Use of a field-based water elutriation system for monitoring the in situ particle size characteristics of fluvial suspended sediment

This paper describes a field-based water elutriation apparatus employed to investigate the in situ particle size characteristics of suspended sediment transported by the River Exe in Devon, UK. The reported procedure allows suspended sediment to be drawn directly from the river channel and hydraulically sorted, without disturbance, into five effective size classes. In addition to providing information on the effective grain size distribution, the approach also enables the absolute grain size composition of each effective size class to be determined. -from Authors