Protecciones naturales contra la socavación en ríos: estudio de caso del río Tomebamba

Abstract

alteration of the bed slope, change the width and variation in velocities. Increases in velocities accelerate bank erosion. It is a common practice, protect the banks against scour processes with protective walls of rock or cement, but this solution brings adverse effects on the river´s hydrodynamic processes. That is why this study propose natural techniques for design structures of rivers bank protection, in order to avoid scour progress processes. The study comprises a one-kilometer section from the Tomebamba River, located in Cuenca-Ecuador, which is vulnerable to degradation by the bank´s scour, and where the executed solutions are not suitable. In the order to design protection banks the following information was collected: channel and floodplain topography, historical hydrological information, detail land use, and particle size of the channel. Scour be quantified from depth and flow velocities, resulting from two-dimensional hydrodynamic modeling of the river from Saint Venant equations. Finally, three design alternatives based on bioengineering and biotechnology techniques are proposed.