Experimental investigation of the total flow resistance in emergent and submerged rigid canopy flows

In canopy flows, flow resistance mainly originates from vegetation drag and depends on vegetation characteristics and flow conditions. In the present study, a series of experiments were performed in various hydraulic scenarios with high stem Reynolds numbers (2641 $\le$ Re_d $\le$ 17333) using relatively sparse rigid canopies, represented with four different dimensionless vegetation densities (0.0044, 0.0098, 0.0174 and 0.0392), on a smooth bed. A novel drag plate mechanism was developed to measure the total flow resistance due to the emergent and submerged vegetation arrays in a staggered pattern under subcritical flow conditions. Manning’s roughness coefficient and Darcy–Weisbach friction factor were adopted to represent the total flow resistance in the analyses. Simple empirical relationships based on roughness concentration and submergence ratio were derived to determine the total flow resistance parameters within a broad range of stem Reynolds numbers. Although relationships were proposed in a simple form to be used for direct practical applications, they show similar or better performance in the prediction of total flow resistance parameters than the existing equations in the literature, which require considerable computational effort. Additionally, analyses demonstrated that the results of the present study and those of similar studies regarding canopy flow resistance are in good agreement. Accordingly, the novel drag plate looks promising for measuring flow resistance due to vegetation and bed conditions similar to those in nature.