Investigation of Suspended Sediment Samplers: A Review

The flow of rivers and streams carries many particles like sand and silts due to erosion phenomenon which are commonly termed as sediments. Sediments transported along the water flow distributes into either bed load or suspended load. The heavier particles settle down the river bed and form the bed load. While the lighter particles gets suspended along the surface of the water body and are termed as suspended load. The change in sediment concentration affects the hydromorphology of rivers to a great extent. The current study focusses on the measurement of the suspended sediment and reviews the various suspended sediment samplers based on different technical parameters such as working principle, accuracy and specifications. Different mechanical samplers such as bottle and trap samplers, pump samplers; electronic samplers such as Acoustic backscatter profiling sensors (ABS), etc. and optical samplers such as Optical backscatter point sensor (OBS), Optical Laser diffraction point sensors (LISST) and many more sensors such as impact sensors, nuclear sensors and conductivity sensors are reported and compared in this review.