• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2015.05a
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• pp.237-237
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• 2015

The district of Marlborough has had more than its share of river management projects over the past 150 years, each one uniquely affecting the geomorphology and flood hazard of the Wairau Plains. A major early project was to block the Opawa distributary channel at Conders Bend. The Opawa distributary channel took a third and more of Wairau River floodwaters and was a major increasing threat to Blenheim. The blocking of the Opawa required the Wairau and Lower Wairau rivers to carry greater flood flows more often. Consequently the Lower Wairau River was breaking out of its stopbanks approximately every seven years. The idea of diverting flood waters at Tuamarina by providing a direct diversion to the sea through the beach ridges was conceptualised back around the 1920s however, limits on resources and machinery meant the mission of excavating this diversion didn't become feasible until the 1960s. In 1964 a 10 m wide pilot channel was cut from the sea to Tuamarina with an initial capacity of $700m^3/s$. It was expected that floods would eventually scour this 'Wairau Diversion' to its design channel width of 150 m. This did take many more years than initially thought but after approximately 50 years with a little mechanical assistance the Wairau Diversion reached an adequate capacity. Using the power of the river to erode the channel out to its design width and depth was a brilliant idea that saved many thousands of dollars in construction costs and it is somewhat ironic that it is that very same concept that is now being used to deal with the aggradation problem that the Wairau Diversion has caused. The introduction of the Wairau Diversion did provide some flood relief to the lower reaches of the river but unfortunately as the Diversion channel was eroding and enlarging the Lower Wairau River was aggrading and reducing in capacity due to its inability to pass its sediment load with reduced flood flows. It is estimated that approximately $2,000,000m^3$ of sediment was deposited on the bed of the Lower Wairau River in the time between the Diversion's introduction in 1964 and 2010, raising the Lower Wairau's bed upwards of 1.5m in some locations. A numerical morphological model (MIKE-11 ST) was used to assess a number of options which led to the decision and resource consent to construct an erodible (fuse plug) bank at the head of the Wairau Diversion to divert more frequent scouring-flows ($+400m^3/s$)down the Lower Wairau River. Full control gates were ruled out on the grounds of expense. The initial construction of the erodible bank followed in late 2009 with the bank's level at the fuse location set to overtop and begin washing out at a combined Wairau flow of $1,400m^3/s$ which avoids berm flooding in the Lower Wairau. In the three years since the erodible bank was first constructed the Wairau River has sustained 14 events with recorded flows at Tuamarina above $1,000m^3/s$ and three of events in excess of $2,500m^3/s$. These freshes and floods have resulted in washout and rebuild of the erodible bank eight times with a combined rebuild expenditure of $80,000. Marlborough District Council's Rivers & Drainage Department maintains a regular monitoring program for the bed of the Lower Wairau River, which consists of recurrently surveying a series of standard cross sections and estimating the mean bed level (MBL) at each section as well as an overall MBL change over time. A survey was carried out just prior to the installation of the erodible bank and another survey was carried out earlier this year. The results from this latest survey show for the first time since construction of the Wairau Diversion the Lower Wairau River is enlarging. It is estimated that the entire bed of the Lower Wairau has eroded down by an overall average of 60 mm since the introduction of the erodible bank which equates to a total volume of $260,000m^3$. At a cost of $$0.30/m^3$ this represents excellent value compared to mechanical dredging which would likely be in excess of $$10/m^3$. This confirms that the idea of using the river to enlarge the channel is again working for the Wairau River system and that in time nature's "excavator" will provide a channel capacity that will continue to meet design requirements.

• KSBB Journal
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.285-292
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• 2000

Support media for yeast immobilization was prepared from a porous volcanic rock used as a moisturizer in orchid growing. The rock was broken to the size of 2-3 mm and burned at $600^{\circ}C$ in a furnace in order to remove organic materials blocking the pores or treated with HCI solution or NaOH solution to remove the inorganic dirts by dissolving. Even through both the acid and the akali solution were effective the latter was not recommendable because it broke the pore structure by dissolving the elements of the media. This media was mainly consisted of SiO2 with $Al_2O_3$ as a minor component and CaO and K2O as trace elements. It had the finely developed pores of $15-80\mu\textrm{m}$size. Yeast immobilization capacity of this media was about $5{\times108}$ cells/ml bed which is large enough to be used for the practical applications. Yeast immobilization capacities of Alumina and Cordierite were much smaller than that of silica-based media. Scanning electron micrograph of Cordierite and Alumina showed uneven surfaces and small size of pores in contrast to relatively smooth surface and large pores of silica based media which means that smooth surface and large pores are desirable for the good adsorption of microbes on the media.

• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.450-457
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• 2019

Sedimentation is a common problem for river ports. But its intensity depends on the rate of sedimentation, channel shape and size, hydrodynamic behavior of the river and the importance of the port. High sedimentation rate in Yangon River has become one major issue for Myanmar as her largest port is located on the Yangon riverbank. As a result of the high sedimentation rate, shallow water area near the confluence of Yangon River, Pazundaung Creek, and Bago River keeps blocking the navigation channel to the Yangon Port, which also limits the size of vessel calling to Yangon Port. Therefore, studies to understand sediment transport process in Yangon River are required because the economic development of Myanmar highly relies on the Yangon Port. This paper aims to calculate the sediment transport and to predict the riverbed elevation changes in Yangon River by using Bagnold (1966) theory. Calculation result shows that huge difference can be found in the bed load transport between the rainy season and dry season in Yangon River, and thus the sedimentation problem would become more severe in the dry season when the transported sediments are reduced. The estimated sedimentation rate in dry season indicates that the rate of riverbed level rise near the Yangon Port area is about 0.063 m per year, which would lead to approximately 3.15 m rise in the riverbed level in next 50 yrs, considering the same workload of dredging to maintain the navigation channel.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.321-326
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• 2019

Image denoising methods based on block matching are founded on the experimental observations that neighboring patches or blocks in images retain similar features with each other, and have been proved to show superior performance in denoising different kinds of noise. The methods, however, take into account only neighboring blocks in searching for similar blocks, and ignore the characteristic features of the reference block itself. Consequently, denoising performance is negatively affected when outliers of the Gaussian distribution are included in the reference block which is to be denoised. In this paper, we propose an expanded block matching method in which noisy images are first decomposed into a number of bit-planes, then the range of true signals are estimated based on the distribution of pixels on the bit-planes, and finally outliers are replaced by the neighboring pixels belonging to the estimated range. In this way, the advantages of the conventional Gaussian filter can be added to the blocking matching method. We tested the proposed method through extensive experiments with well known test-bed images, and observed that performance gain can be achieved by the proposed method.