Suspended sediment concentration distribution using Tsallis entropy

Abstract Assuming sediment movement in channel flow as steady, Tsallis entropy is employed for deriving the distribution of sediment concentration. This distribution is found to be analogous to the distribution obtained from a random walk model. The sediment concentration distribution parameters are obtained from physical considerations. With these parameters, the distribution is tested using experimental observations and its sensitivity is evaluated. The agreement between entropy-based distribution and laboratory observations is found to be close.