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Formation of the initial bedforms, known as sand-wavelets, developing from a flat erodible bed in hydrodynamically smooth flow has been studied numerically. The computational model consists of hydrodynamic and sediment transport equations. The unsteady hydrodynamic equations are solved by Large-Eddy-Simulation (LES) and Immersed-Boundary-Method (IBM) on a non-bodyfitted grid. Dynamics of individual grains are neglected and only bedload is considered, as calculated from Van Rijn’s equation (1984, Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, Vol. 110). Two-dimensional (2D) bed evolution is coupled with the above 3-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic equations. The computed wavelength agrees with linear stability analysis and with experimental data in the literature. The length of the sand-wavelets is observed to correspond to the disturbance region of bed shear stress caused by discontinuities on the bed surface, as postulated by Yalin (1977, Mechanics of Sediment Transport, Pergamon press).