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 (