Estimation of Mud and Sand Fractions and Total Concentration From Coupled Optical-Acoustic Sensors

Optical turbidity and acoustic sensors have been widely used in laboratory experiments and field studies to investigate suspended particulate matter concentration over the last four decades. Both methods face a serious challenge as laboratory and in-situ calibrations are usually required. Furthermore, in coastal and estuarine environments, the coexistence of mud and sand often results in multimodal particle size distributions, amplifying erroneous measurements. This paper proposes a new approach of combining a pair of optical turbidity-acoustic sensors to estimate the total concentration and sediment composition of a mud/sand mixture in an efficient way without an extensive calibration. More specifically, we first carried out a set of 54 bimodal size regime experiments to derive empirical functions of optical-acoustic signals, concentrations, and mud/sand fractions. The functionalities of these relationships were then tested and validated using more complex multimodal size regime experiments over 30 optical-acoustic pairs of 5 wavelengths (420, 532, 620, 700, 852 nm) and six frequencies (0.5, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 MHz). In the range of our data, without prior knowledge of particle size distribution, combinations between optical wavelengths 620–700 nm and acoustic frequencies 4–6 MHz predict mud/sand fraction and total concentration with the variation <10% for the former and <15% for the later. The results also suggest that acoustic-acoustic signals could be combined to produce meaningful information regarding concentration and mud/sand fraction, while no useful knowledge could be extracted from a combination of optical-optical pairs. This approach therefore enables the robust estimation of suspended sediment concentration and composition, which is particularly practical in cases where calibration data is insufficient.