Flow conditions under which jamming events occur

To understand the conditions under which surface jams form (log jams), I conducted a series of experiments in my fluid flume, modulating the log size, flow rate, and gate width.

This experimental work was inspired by beaver dams.  An early hypothesis of my work (still not proven) was that dam building by beavers happened under conditions in which natural log jams were likely to form.  Not that beavers were building log jams, but rather that they had an intuitive understanding of water flow and how that might relate to conditions that might enable successful dam building to occur.

I first wanted to characterize the conditions under which these log jams might naturally occur.