Particle-driven gravity currents cause major geological problems. Turbidity currents are highly erosive and can be damaging to structures on the sea bottom such as telecommunication cables. Understanding the mechanisms of sediment transport and deposition is required to predict the erosive powers of turbidity currents (and of the distribution of turbidite deposits) which are fully dependent on the behavior of gravity currents. For this reason, the main question of this thesis was formulated: Which physical parameters of the gravity current are of importance for its behaviour?

The lock-exchange release experiment is a frequently used method to study gravity currents in a laboratory and was also used in this thesis. In order to answer the main question, the following parameters were investigated and their influence specifically on the 4 phases, the run-out length and the PSD: particle size, bed roughness and temperature. The influence of particles size was researched using mono-dispersed vs bi-dispersed experiments. In the bed roughness experiments, sandpaper was attached to the bottom and compared to smooth bed experiments. Finally, to investigate the influence of temperature on the gravity current, experiments with warm water were compared to experiments with colder water.

From these experiments, the most notable results are summarized below.
PSD : For all experiments applies that at low concentration the particles segregate over the run-out length of the gravity current. Smaller particles travelled further than the bigger particles with a higher settling velocity. This does not occur at higher concentrations and the PSD over the entire run-out length is similar.
Four Phases: In all experiments, the four phases could clearly be identified with one exception: the first phase in the rough bed experiments was difficult to distinguish.
Run out length: Some interesting findings were made that were in line with literature: adding fine particles to the mixture of the current cause the run-out length of the current to increase. However, it was also found that if the initial concentration is increased, this effect decreases.
Furthermore experiments showed that an increase in temperature can cause the current to travel less far when compared to experiments performed with water with lower temperature.

In the light of this research, the following recommendation are made:
Temperature should be taken into account for modelling gravity currents. Otherwise this can lead to an overestimation regarding the run-out length and an underestimation of the deposit density.
Furthermore, to get more insight in the effect of the particle sizes in the currents, it would be highly recommended to conduct more experiments with a greater difference between particle sizes. This would allow for a better assessment of the magnitude of the effect of hindered settling