Automated measurement of suspended sediments is crucial to the study of sediment transport. The short duration, high-intensity flows that are responsible for a large fraction of sediment movement are best observed by continuous monitoring systems. Acoustic systems are ideal for continuous monitoring and add the advantage of nonintrusively measuring through the water column. In the present work, a single-frequency acoustic system for measuring suspended-sediment concentration in fluvial environments is described. The equipment and procedures used in developing hardware and software for the acoustic technique in two sets of laboratory flume experiments will be presented. Both implicit and explicit methods were used to convert backscatter data into sediment concentrations. The implicit method yielded 39% error and the explicit, 20%.
