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Coastal sediments are usually mixtures of particles of various sizes, such as clay (<4 μm), silt (4-62.5 μm) and fine sand (62.5-500 μm), as well as organic matter (van Rijn, 2006). Classification of sediment fraction is defined by sediment size according to the Wentworth grain size scale. Sand-or sand-dominated mixtures are noncohesive and eroded particle by particle, whereas clay-dominated mixtures are cohesive and have a strong relationship between particles. Silt or silt-dominated mixtures with limited clay content, which are widely distributed in the Modern Yellow River Delta (Jia et al., 2020), Jiangsu coast (C. K. Zhang, 2012), etc., have been proven to hold

The importance of the flocculation process in understanding depositional patterns and hence the phenomenon of sediment transport has long been acknowledged (Einstein & Krone, 1962;Gibbs, 1985;Hill et al., 2013). The added cohesion from clay sediment causes individual particles in a water column to stick together to form aggregates or flocs, which are very fragile (Guo et al., 2017;Mietta et al., 2009;Wang et al., 2018). Flocculation of natural mud has a great potential to alter flocs with sizes, densities, and shapes (and thus settling velocity) that are vastly different from original constitutive primary particles (