Published Paper Details:

Most of the rivers of The north-eastern region of India originate from the foothills of the Himalayas and they usually carry huge sediment load during most of the time of the year. As these rivers enter the Assam valley, due to drastic reduction in bed slope, their velocities decrease rapidly and as a result they deposit these sediments on their respective beds, causing them to rise, reducing the waterway for the flow and form sandbars at the middle of the channels. During monsoon, when these rivers run in full discharge, the current hits the banks and erode them. Hence the use of effective river training works is a must in these rivers to counteract the problem of erosion. Different agencies are continuously applying mitigating measures for controlling riverbank erosion, by laying of porcupine screens. However, the success rates of such installations are very limited, which may be a result of lack of proper design procedure & specification and for the fact that the existing layout patterns of such structures are not dependent anyway on the factors like characteristics of flow and channel geometry etc of the sites where they are intended to be installed. In the present study, it was planned to critically compare the performance of different porcupine models on the basis of their capacity to cause sediment deposition in near bank. During the study scaled down porcupine models were prepared based on characteristics like channel dimension and discharge. The models were installed in an experimental field channel and the changes in the channel bed within the porcupine fields due to the installation of the porcupine models, were measured by means of a point gauge to find out the best performing porcupine models under different submergence ratios.