Universität Stuttgart
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/1
Browse
441 results
Search Results
Item Open Access Hydrologische und hydraulische Entwurfsgrundlagen und Bemessungsrichtlinien : Vorwort zum Sonderheft(1988) Kobus, HelmutAm 21. Juli 1987 fand an der Universität Stuttgart eine Vortragsveranstaltung statt, die sich mit den hydrologischen und hydraulischen Aspekten der Sicherheit von Stauanlagen befaßte. Das Sonderheft der WASSERWIRTSCHAFT enthält die Beiträge dieser Veranstaltung, welche vom Ministerium für Umwelt Baden-Württemberg gemeinsam mit dem Institut für Wasserbau der Universität Stuttgart ausgerichtet und vom Lehrstuhl für Technische Hydromechanik und Wasserbauliches Versuchswesen organisatorisch betreut wurde.Item Open Access Modernization criteria assessment for water resources planning; Klamath Irrigation Project, U.S.(2008) Freeman, Beau J.; Bárdossy, András (Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dr.-Ing.)Agricultural irrigation is the largest consumer of diverted surface water and groundwater resources in the world, with major regions becoming critically water deficit. Agriculture in the western United States (US) and elsewhere has reached the point where the demands from irrigators, domestic users, and various commercial interests for allocated quantities and qualities are beyond acceptable levels for environmental needs in many river basins. Despite decades of investment in irrigation projects by governments, foreign lending agencies, and development banks in numerous countries, irrigation performance remains unsatisfactorily low and in many places progress is being reversed due to water logging, salinization, over-drafting of aquifers, environmental degradation, and infrastructure deterioration. Maintaining current irrigation practices will lead to worsening environmental and economic consequences. To restore healthy ecosystems and sustain irrigated agriculture, irrigation modernization should be promoted as a key component of basin-level water management to effectively balance competing water needs. Improvements in the technical and economic efficiency of irrigation water use through modernization increase the quantity and quality of freshwater available in a river basin. Significant public and private investments in modernization will be required to facilitate the precise control and monitoring of reallocated flows at different levels of irrigation systems, especially on a real-time basis, and thus provide excellent water delivery service to water districts, end-users, and other commercial and environmental stakeholders. This doctoral study investigates a specific problem that many irrigation professionals and water resources planners will face in the future: how to effectively analyze and make an assessment of irrigation modernization project-alternatives. Selecting the best modernization strategy to pursue from potential project-alternatives in water resources planning is a complex decision-making process. Irrigation modernization alternatives and their impacts involve a variety of diverse stakeholders in the selection of preferred engineering solutions based on subjectively defined criteria (quantitative and qualitative). As a consequence, technical feasibility, environmental, social/community, institutional, political, and economic factors have to be properly assessed as part of water resources planning. This research introduces a strategic decision analysis methodology for the definition, evaluation, ranking, and selection of appropriate modernization strategies in an engineering case study of the Klamath Irrigation Project (89,000 ha). In 2001 a combination of events occurred there that led to one of the most prominent conflicts over water supplies in the U.S. Due to stricter flow requirements put in place to protect fish species and a critical drought, irrigation water was unexpectedly withheld from the majority of farms in the Project, resulting in major economic losses, calling the basis for environmental restrictions into question, and generating intense political controversy. The composite programming approach is applied to develop a project ranking index based on standardized indicators – effective for analyzing the trade-offs associated with balancing technical and water conservation considerations with eco-system health, economics, and risk. This modernization criteria assessment requires defining the management objectives according to the nature of the internal processes and agro-hydrological features of the system, selection of alternative engineering solutions, selection of appropriate decision criteria relevant to the specific water-related problems, and the assignment of desirable and critical threshold values pertinent to each criterion. Input data consist of hydrologic, agronomic, engineering, economic, and political/policy information.Item Open Access Porosity and permeability alterations in processes of biomineralization in porous media - microfluidic investigations and their interpretation(Stuttgart : Eigenverlag des Instituts für Wasser- und Umweltsystemmodellierung der Universität Stuttgart, 2022) Weinhardt, Felix; Class, Holger (apl. Prof. Dr.-Ing)Motivation: Biomineralization refers to microbially induced processes resulting in mineral formations. In addition to complex biomineral structures frequently formed by marine organisms, like corals or mussels, microbial activities may also indirectly induce mineralization. A famous example is the formation of stromatolites, which result from biofilm activities that locally alter the chemical and physical properties of the environment in favor of carbonate precipitation. Recently, biomineralization gained attention as an engineering application. Especially with the background of global warming and the objective to reduce CO2 emissions, biomineralization offers an innovative and sustainable alternative to the usage of conventional Portland cement, whose production currently contributes significantly to global CO2 emissions. The most widely used method of biomineralization in engineering applications, is ureolytic calcium carbonate precipitation, which relies on the hydrolysis of urea and the subsequent precipitation of calcium carbonate. The hydrolysis of urea at moderate temperatures is relatively slow and therefore needs to be catalyzed by the enzyme urease to be practical for applications. Urease can be extracted from plants, for example from ground jack beans, and the process is consequently referred to as enzyme-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (ECIP). Another method is microbially induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP), which uses ureolytic bacteria that produce the enzyme in situ. EICP and MICP applications allow for producing various construction materials, stabilizing soils, or creating hydraulic barriers in the subsurface. The latter can be used, for example, to remediate leakages at the top layer of gas storage reservoirs, or to contain contaminant plumes in aquifers. Especially when remediating leakages in the subsurface, the most crucial parameter to be controlled is its intrinsic permeability. A valuable tool for predicting and planning field applications is the use of numerical simulation at the scale of representative elementary volumes (REV). For that, the considered domain is subdivided into several REV’s, which do not resolve the pore space in detail, but represent it by averaged parameters, such as the porosity and permeability. The porosity describes the ratio of the pore space to the considered bulk volume, and the permeability quantifies the ease of fluid flow through a porous medium. A change in porosity generally also affects permeability. Therefore, for REV-scale simulations, constitutive relationships are utilized to describe permeability as a function of porosity. There are several porosity-permeability relationships in the literature, such as the Kozeny-Carman relationship, Verma-Pruess, or simple power-law relationships. These constitutive relationships can describe individual states but usually do not include the underlying processes. Different boundary conditions during biomineralization may influence the course of porosity-permeability relationships. However, these relationships have not yet been adequately addressed. Pore-scale simulations are, in principle, very well suited to investigate pore space changes and their effects on permeability systematically. However, these simulations also rely on simplifications and assumptions. Therefore, it is essential to conduct experimental studies to investigate the complex processes during calcium carbonate precipitation in detail at the pore scale. Recent studies have shown that microfluidic methods are particularly suitable for this purpose. However, previous microfluidic studies have not explicitly addressed the impact of biomineralization on hydraulic effects. Therefore, this work aims to identify relevant phenomena at the pore scale to conclude on the REV-scale parameters, porosity and permeability, and their relationship. Contributions: This work comprises three publications. First, a suitable microfluidic setup and workflow were developed in Weinhardt et al. [2021a] to study pore space changes and the associated hydraulic effects reliably. This paper illustrated the benefits and insights of combining optical microscopy and micro X-ray computed tomography (micro XRCT) with hydraulic measurements in microfluidic chips. The elaborated workflow allowed for quantitative analysis of the evolution of calcium carbonate precipitates in terms of their size, shape, and spatial distribution. At the same time, their influence on differential pressure could be observed as a measure of flow resistance. Consequently, porosity and permeability changes could be determined. Along with this paper, we published two data sets [Weinhardt et al., 2021b, Vahid Dastjerdi et al., 2021] and set the basis for two other publications. In the second publication [von Wolff et al., 2021], the simulation results of a pore-scale numerical model, developed by Lars von Wolff, were compared to the experimental data of the first paper [Weinhardt et al., 2021b]. We observed a good agreement between the experimental data and the model results. The numerical studies complemented the experimental observations in allowing for accurate analysis of crystal growth as a function of local velocity profiles. In particular, we observed that crystal aggregates tend to grow toward the upstream side, where the supply of reaction products is higher than on the downstream side. Crystal growth during biomineralization under continuous inflow is thus strongly dependent on the locally varying velocities in a porous medium. In the third publication [Weinhardt et al., 2022a], we conducted further microfluidic experiments based on the experimental setup and workflow of the first contribution and published another data set [Weinhardt et al., 2022b]. We used microfluidic cells with a different, more realistic pore structure and investigated the influence of different injection strategies. We found that the development of preferential flow paths during EICP application may depend on the given boundary conditions. Constant inflow rates can lead to the development of preferential flow paths and keep them open. Gradually reduced inflow rates can mitigate this effect. In addition, we concluded that the coexistence of multiple calcium carbonate polymorphs and their transformations could influence the temporal evolution of porosity-permeability relationships.Item Open Access Abflusskonzentration in mesoskaligen Einzugsgebieten unter Berücksichtigung des Sickerraumes(2006) Rojanschi, Vlad; Bárdossy, András (Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dr.-Ing. habil.)Die physikalisch-basierte Modellierung der Abflusskonzentrationsprozesse in einem Einzugsgebiet wird üblicherweise auf die Modellierung von drei strickt von einander abgetrennten Teilen, dem Boden- (Wurzel-) Raum, dem Grundwasserraum und den Oberflächengewässern, reduziert. Dieses Schema vernachlässigt allerdings, dass sich zwischen dem Boden- und dem Grundwasserraum ein weiterer Bereich befindet, der hier als Sickerraum bezeichnet wird und der aus demjenigen Teil der ungesättigten Zone besteht, der nicht dem Bodenraum zugerechnet wird. Für größere Einzugsgebiete treten im Sickerraum, der bis zu mehreren hundert Metern mächtig sein kann, auch kleinere schwebende gesättigte Bereiche auf, was dazu führt, dass die Strömungsrichtung im Sickerraum nicht nur vertikal, sondern auch horizontal ist. Die Vernachlässigung der dort stattfindenden Prozesse schränkt die Aussagekraft des Gesamtmodells deutlich ein. Deshalb wurde die Modellierung der Abflusskonzentration unter Berücksichtigung der hydrologischen Rolle des Sickerraumes als Hauptthema dieser Arbeit ausgewählt. Untersuchungseinheiten sind das Einzugsgebiet der Oberen Donau (bis zum Pegel Passau-Achleiten, 77.000 km2), das ein Forschungschwerpunkt des BMBF-Projektverbundes GLOWA ist, und zwei ausgewählte Teileinzugsgebiete(Ammer und Naab). Der erste Schritt ist eine umfassende Untersuchung über die Anwendbarkeit von Ganglinienanalyseverfahren für die Abtrennung des Grundwasser- und Sickerraumabflusses von der gemessenen Gesamtabflussganglinie. Ein numerisches Programm, das erstmals zwölf relevante Ganglinienanalyseverfahren in einem einheitlichen Rahmen implementiert, wurde hier entwickelt und auf Ganglinien aus dem gesamten Gebiet der Oberen Donau angewandt. Die Analyse der Ergebnisse, ihrer Abhängigkeit von der Raum und Zeitskala, sowie ihrer Verbindung zu den Gebietseigenschaften führte zu neuen Erkenntnissen über die Verfahren. Eine Schätzung des Grundwasser- und Sickerraumabflusses konnte damit für jedes Teileinzugsgebiet berechnet werden. Die Analyse zeigt aber auch, dass die Verfahren mit Inkonsistenzen und Willkürlichkeiten behaftet sind, was nicht zu einer Anwendung ihrer Ergebnisse für quantitative Aussagen ermutigt. Im zweiten Schritt wurde ein neues Modellkonzept, das die explizite Betrachtung des Sickerraumes ermöglicht und damit die Modellierungslücke zwischen dem Bodenwasserhaushalts- und dem Grundwassermodell schließt, entwickelt, implementiert und auf das Gebiet der Ammer angewandt. Nicht nur die Modellgüte, sondern auch die Unsicherheit der Modellergebnisse und bei der Bestimmung der Modellparameter, die generalisierte und einzelne Sensitivität des Modells im Parameterraum, sowie die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen den Modellparametern wurden ausführlich untersucht. Mehrere Modellversionen mit unterschiedlichen Graden an Konzeptualisierung wurden dabei verglichen. Trotz der allgemein guten Anpassung der Modellergebnisse an die Modelldaten, konnten anhand der inversen Modellierung auf Grund der strukturellen Unsicherheit des Modells und der Eingangsdaten keine gut bestimmten Parameterwerte für den Sickerraum berechnet werden. Das führte dazu, dass interne Modellergebnisse wie der Grundwasserabfluss und der Sickerraumabfluss auch von einer großen Unsicherheit behaftet waren. Die allgemeine Erkenntnis ist, dass nur die Modellergebnisse, die anhand von Messdaten direkt geprüft werden können, als validiert und aussagekraftig gelten sollten. Um das Problem der strukturellen Unsicherheit zu lösen, wurde in einem dritten Schritt die Methode der inversen Modellierung erweitert und verbessert. Ein Regionalisierungsverfahren, dass die Modellparameter mit den Gebietseigenschaften mit Hilfe von linearen Beziehungen verbindet, wurde in den Kalibrierungsprozess direkt integriert. Der Ansatz wurde auf die Einzugsgebiete der Ammer und der Naab angewandt und lieferte gute Modellergebnisse und führte gleichzeitig zu einer viel geringeren strukturellen Unsicherheit des Modells. Durch die Interpretation der linearen Beziehungen konnten auch Schlüsse über die physikalische Plausibilität des Modells gezogen werden.Item Open Access Dimensionally reduced model concepts for the simulation of multi-phase flow and transport processes in porous media : advanced pore-network and embedded tubular network models(Stuttgart : Eigenverlag des Instituts für Wasser- und Umweltsystemmodellierung der Universität Stuttgart, 2026) Wu, Hanchuan; Helmig, Rainer (Porf. Dr.-Ing.)The focus of thesis is the developing of model concepts for simulating multiphase flow and transport in porous media using dimensional-reduced network structures, with a particular focus on two different scenarios: embedded tubular network model and advanced pore-network model. First, an embedded tubular network model (mixeddimension model) is coupled with a three-dimensional bulk model. This model can be applied to simulate the flow and transport in tubular structures which are embedded in porous media. Second, a dynamic two-phase pore-network model is introduced to describe flow and transport in porous media at the pore scale. The void spaces in porous media are described discretely by the pore-network model. Across both scenarios, the emphasis in this work is to address the specific numerical challenges brought by the nonlinearities when considering two-phase flow. To achieve this, we need mathematically consistent formulations and accurate, robust, and efficient numerical schemes.Item Open Access Investigation of evapotranspiration concepts in hydrological modelling for climate change impact assessment(2007) Hartmann, Gabriele Maria; Bárdossy, András (Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Dr. rer. nat. )Climate change (CC) will impact water resources. Assessing the extent of these impacts in due time is an important task, as it forms the basis for decision making. Unfortunately, the extent of this forecasted impact depends very much on data and tools used for this task. Although such methods might work well with present climatic conditions, it has to be doubted whether their results can still be relied upon in a changed climate. The uncertainties in the forecasts are partly of meteorological and partly of hydrological origin. Whereas the uncertainties of GCMs are well known and often discussed, the problems of hydrological models in this context are seldom investigated. In particular the uncertainty in process representation within the hydrological models must be revised. This dissertation focuses on the representation of the evapotranspiration (ET) process, because this process will be strongly influenced by CC. For this purpose, the suitability of nine different ET models was investigated. In a theoretical investigation, the sensitivity of the ET models to only a small change in temperature was found to be very different. Thus the question had to be raised as to how the resulting ET from these models will change with the entire predicted CC. Therefore a spatially distributed hydrological model based on the HBV concept was set up and the results of the different ET models were used consecutively as input to the hydrological model. The modelling was applied on the Upper Neckar catchment, a mesoscale river in southwestern Germany with a basin size of about 4,000 km2. This catchment was divided into 13 subcatchments with different subcatchment characteristics. The suitability of the different ET approaches was checked by calibrating the hydrological model on different climatic periods and then applying the model on other climatic periods. Thus, different 10-year periods with different climatic conditions were compiled: 10 cold, 10 warm, 10 wet and 10 dry years from the time series 1961–1990 were collected. The first step was to adapt the model to the same period it was calibrated to. Then the model was applied to other 10 years, i.e. the model calibrated on for example, the cold years was used on the warm years. The transferability was also checked by applying the models on the period 1991–2000. For the investigation of the impact of CC, the calibration of the model must meet special requirements. Apart from the selection of proper periods for calibration and validation, this also concerns the establishment of a suitable objective function. Such a function is the Nash Sutcliffe efficiency. Usually it is calculated comparing observed and modelled daily values. In this study it is shown that problems in the transfer from one climatic condition to the other cannot be detected on the base of daily values. Therefore parameter sets were optimized by an automatic calibration procedure based on Simulated Annealing, which considered the model performance on different time scales simultaneously (days up to years). As the results show, some of the ET models, which work well under stationary conditions, are not able to reproduce changes in a realistic manner. The results also show that calibrating a hydrological model that is supposed to handle short as well as long term signals becomes an important task; the objective function especially has to be chosen very carefully.Item Open Access High order interactions among environmental variables : diagnostics and initial steps towards modeling(2013) Rodríguez Fernández, Jhan Ignacio; Bárdossy, András (Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dr.-Ing.)In the field of geostatistics and spatial statistics, variogram based models have proved a very flexible and useful tool. However, such spatial models take into account only interdependencies between pairs of variables, mostly in the form of covariances. In the present work, we point out to the necessity to extend the interdependence models beyond covariance modeling; we summarize some of the difficulties arising when attempting such extensions; and propose an approach to address these difficulties.Item Open Access Die Quellstärke in der Sickerwasserprognose : Möglichkeiten und Grenzen von Labor- und Freilanduntersuchungen(2010) Mackenberg, Sylvia; Metzger, Jörg W. (Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil.)Den Umgang mit kontaminierten Böden und Standorten im Rahmen des Boden- und Grundwasserschutzes regeln in Deutschland das Bundes-Bodenschutzgesetz und die Bundes-Bodenschutz- und Altlastenverordnung (BBodSchV). Die Durchführung einer Sickerwasserprognose dient der Gefährdungsabschätzung einer Grundwasserkontamination durch Bodenbelastungen. Gemäß der BBodSchV umfasst sie Untersuchungen zur Mobilisierbarkeit von Stoffen durch das Bodensickerwasser sowie eine Transportbetrachtung der gelösten Stoffe bis zum Ort der Beurteilung, die Grenze zwischen der ungesättigten und der gesättigten Bodenzone. Neben dieser bundesweit geltenden Verordnung existieren landesinterne Regelungen sowie Verfahrensvorschläge in der Baustoffbranche zum Umgang mit Baustoff und Recyclingprodukten. Allen Fragestellungen gemein ist die Abschätzung der im Sickerwasser gelösten Stoffkomponenten sowie ihrer Konzentrationen nach dem Passieren eines kontaminierten Materials, was als Quellstärke bezeichnet wird. Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war es, Aussagen über die Vergleichbarkeit der in diesen Testverfahren erzielbaren Ergebnisse abzuleiten. Weiterhin stand die potenzielle Übertragbarkeit von Ergebnissen, die in Laborversuchen zur Bestimmung der Quellstärke im Rahmen einer Sickerwasserprognose ermittelt werden, auf reale Verhältnisse im Fokus der Untersuchungen. Basierend auf einer Beurteilung der Praxisrelevanz der einzelnen Laborverfahren sollte abschließend ein Verfahrensvorschlag zur Bestimmung der Quellstärke erarbeitet werden: In Batchversuchen wurden der Einfluss des Wasser-Feststoffverhältnisses (WFV) auf die qualitative und quantitative stoffliche Zusammensetzung des Eluats sowie die potenzielle Mobilisierbarkeit von Schadstoffe untersucht. Die Erhöhung des WFV bei anorganischen Stoffkomponenten führte in der Regel zu einer Verringerung der Stoffkonzentration. Im Gegensatz dazu wurden bei Materialien, die mit polycyclischen aromatischen Kohlenwasserstoffen (PAK) kontaminiert waren, unabhängig vom jeweiligen WFV immer konstante PAK-Konzentrationen gemessen. Vergleichbare Ergebnisse wurden in Laborsäulenversuchen bei voller Wassersättigung erzielt. Aufgetragen über das WFV nehmen die Konzentrationen der meisten anorganischen Stoffkomponenten bei stationären Versuchsbedingungen mit zunehmender Versuchsdauer ab. Die PAK-Konzentrationen wiesen konstante Werte auf. Im Rahmen der Untersuchungen zum Einfluss der Schichthöhe wurde die absolute Kontaktzeit zwischen dem Eluat und dem Untersuchungsmaterial (Aufenthaltsdauer des Eluats in der Säule) variiert. Bei gleichem WFV entstanden keine Konzentrationsunterschiede aufgrund einer größeren Schichthöhe. Auch die Verringerung der Flussrate und damit eine Erhöhung der spezifischen Kontaktzeit (direkter Kontakt zwischen Eluat und Bodenmatrix pro Wegstrecke) führte bei anorganischen Schadstoffen nur in wenigen Fällen zu einer Konzentrationsänderung. Für PAK wurden unterschiedliche Ergebnisse in Abhängigkeit des pH-Werts erzielt. Bei einem pH-Wert von 8 wurde eine Konzentrationsabnahme um mehrere Größenordnungen registriert, bei einem pH-Wert von 12 zeigte sich keine Änderung der Konzentration. Diese Unterschiede wurden auf mikrobiologische Aktivität bei einem pH-Wert von 8 zurückgeführt, die in einem basischen Milieu weitestgehend unterbunden wird. Um die Übertragbarkeit der Ergebnisse von Laboruntersuchungen auf Feldsituationen beurteilen zu können, wurden Versuche mit Laborlysimetern und Freilandsäulen unter Teilsättigung durchgeführt. Für PAK führen Laborversuche häufig zu einer Überschätzung des Gefährdungspotenzials, da ein biologischer Abbau bei vollständiger Wassersättigung stark gehemmt wird. Die im Labor ermittelten Konzentrationen anorganischer Stoffkomponenten stimmten größenordnungsmäßig mit den Konzentrationen der Freilandversuche überein. Infolge natürlich wechselnder Niederschläge und Temperaturschwankungen wichen die im Freiland gemessenen Konzentrationen bei gleichem WFV immer wieder von den Konzentrationen der Laborversuche unter stationären Bedingungen ab. Basierend auf den Ergebnissen der Untersuchungen wurde ein Vorschlag für ein praktisches Verfahren zur Bestimmung der Quellstärke ausgearbeitet, der die Aspekte Wirtschaftlichkeit und Praktikabilität der Durchführung, insbesondere im Hinblick auf eine akzeptable Versuchsdauer, vereint. Das stufenweise Vorgehen unterscheidet zwischen Materialien die mit anorganischen Schadstoffen bzw. Materialien die mit PAK belastet sind. Zu Beginn der Quellstärkebestimmung von Materialien mit anorganischen Schadstoffen stehen einfache Batchversuche. In Abhängigkeit der daraus erzielbaren Ergebnisse folgen gegebenenfalls Laborsäulenuntersuchungen mit variierbaren Fließbedingungen. Die Quellstärke PAK-haltiger Materialien wird in Abhängigkeit ihres jeweiligen pH-Werts ebenfalls anhand einfacher Batchversuche oder anhand von aufwändigeren Laborsäulenuntersuchungen mit einer Wasserteilsättigung der eingebauten Materialschicht ermittelt.Item Open Access Introduction to air-water flows(1991) Kobus, HelmutFor many hydraulic structures, safe operation can only be achieved if not only the characteristics of the water flow are considered, but due attention is also given to the simultaneous movement of air in the system. Although the difference in specific weight of air and water is so large that they are usually well separated by a sharp interface, a number of flow configurations lead to an intensive mixing across this surface. This process is called air entrainment. Consideration of the effects of entrained air upon water flow may be essential to provide for the safe operation of a hydraulic structure.Item Open Access High-resolution spatio-temporal measurements of the colmation phenomenon under laboratory conditions(Stuttgart : Eigenverlag des Instituts für Wasser- und Umweltsystemmodellierung der Universität Stuttgart, 2022) Mayar, Mohammad Assem; Wieprecht, Silke (Prof. Dr.-Ing.)The fine sediment infiltration and accumulation into the gravel bed of rivers, the so-called colmation phenomenon, is a pernicious process exacerbated by anthropogenic activities. Owing to the importance and complexity of this phenomenon, it has been widely studied over the last decades. Various devices and methods have been developed to assess this phenomenon, where most of them are destructive and sample-based, resulting in an alteration of the natural conditions. Therefore, non-intrusive techniques, which provide spatial and temporal details with a high-resolution, are required to discretize the mechanisms involved in the colmation process. To address these issues, investigations under laboratory conditions may simplify the complexity of nature and enable individual and exactly defined boundary conditions to be investigated. Therefore, this thesis aims at (i) developing a non-intrusive and undisturbed measurement method for the high-resolution spatio-temporal measurements of the sediment infiltration processes and the development of sediment accumulation in an artificial river bed under laboratory conditions, (ii) applying this method to certain experiments for the assessment of the effects of different boundary conditions on sediment infiltration, and (iii) investigating the colmation phenomenon (also known as clogging) of gravel beds. For this purpose, the gamma-ray attenuation method is used together with an artificial gravel bed arranged from the spheres with various diameters and placed in a laboratory flume. This new method works based on the gamma radiation that passes through the infiltrated sediments, water, and bed spheres, in which the gamma-ray attenuation is linked to the variations of the infiltrated sediments’ quantity. The main simplification of this approach is that gravel beds are represented by the combinations of different-sized spheres. This gives the opportunity to fully distinguish infiltrating sediments from the bed material, reduce the complexity of the natural environment, and allows for repetitive measurements of the same position with different boundary conditions. From the results of this study, first, the gamma-ray attenuation measurement method was optimized to resolve the inconsistencies in the measurements. Subsequently, the concept of the non-intrusive and undisturbed measurement is proved through box experiments. Additional reproducibility experiments in the laboratory flume, for a similar bed structure, showed only small deviations between two experiments with the same setup. Consequently, the established technique was used in a series of experiments to evaluate the effects of different supply rates, total supply masses, and sediment particle size boundary conditions on the sediment infiltration and colmation processes. Vertical profiles of the infiltrated sediment were quantified through high spatial resolution measurements. Furthermore, to evaluate the infiltrating sediment accumulation development, and the temporal variations of the infiltrated sediments, the vertical profile measurements were first repeated after a specific time-period to track interval-averaged variations in all positions of the vertical axis. Next, a specific position of the vertical axis was measured continuously during the entire experiment in a high temporal resolution. The measured vertical profiles illustrate the vertical distribution, colmation, and unimpeded percolation of the infiltrated sediments. The dynamic one-point measurement precisely identifies the three phases (the start of the pore-filling, the required time to fill the pore, and the final amount of infiltrated sediments including natural fluctuation during the ongoing experiments) of the sediment infiltration or the possible clogging. As a limitation, the gamma-ray attenuation system’s current configuration only works in artificial gravel beds because of the given density difference between infiltrated sediments and the artificial bed structure. Intense radiations that pass through the natural bed's thickness are capable of detecting a significant amount of infiltrated sediments. However, small amounts of infiltrated sediments will create only a minimal shift in attenuation, which might be confused with the statistical error. In addition, the legal restriction against using radioactive material in the natural environment is another reason for not applying it in the field. Furthermore, the gamma-ray attenuation method cannot resolve the sediment distribution in the measurement horizon and provides an integrative result for each measurement position. In addition, if a mixture of silt, clay, and sand is supplied to the experiment, the gamma-ray attenuation system will produce a bulk result of all the infiltrated materials. To conclude, despite the limitations mentioned above, the gamma-ray attenuation method offers a unique opportunity for the non-intrusive and undisturbed measurements of the sediment infiltration or the special case of colmation, with a high spatio-temporal resolution. This method has the potential to quantify the investigated processes on a millimetric spatial scale, if the measurement time is not a constraint, or vice versa, in a high temporal resolution (seconds) for a specific position, if spatial scale is not important. Moreover, the gamma-ray attenuation approach can simultaneously measure the longitudinal distribution of the sedimentological processes, if multiple instruments or a single device with several radiation-emitting-holes is in operation. Last, but not least, rather than the spheres, artificial gravel beds could be made of any substance with a composition significantly different from the infiltrating sediments, and the boundary conditions of the experiments can be improved in order to attain conditions close to nature. Finally, the gamma-ray attenuation method can be integrated with advanced flow measurement instruments such as Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and other high-resolution endoscopic devices to track the behavior of fine sediment infiltration and its clogging process in the porous gravel beds as it occurs in nature.