Irrigation
A. Mosaedi; E. Ramezanipour; M. Mesdaghi; M. Tajbakhshian
Abstract
Introduction: Soil erosion and sediment transportation decrease water resources, and cause many social and economic problems. On the other hand, sediment transportation by rivers causes problems such as water quality degradation, reservoirs sedimentation, redirect of rivers, or decrease in their transportability. ...
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Introduction: Soil erosion and sediment transportation decrease water resources, and cause many social and economic problems. On the other hand, sediment transportation by rivers causes problems such as water quality degradation, reservoirs sedimentation, redirect of rivers, or decrease in their transportability. Therefore, finding the proper methods in sediment yield study in watersheds is essential in planning and management of land and water resources. Climatic characteristics, physiography, geology, and hydrology of basins are the most effective factors in producing and transporting sediments according to several sources, but the role and impact of some factors are more pronounced than the others in different areas. As a result, the objective of this study was to investigate and identify the most important climatic, physiographic, geological, and hydrological factors in several watersheds of the northeastern part of Iran, by applying Gamma Test (GT) and principal component analysis (PCA) techniques.Materials and Methods: In this study, the data of discharge flow and suspended sediment concentration, and daily flow discharge recorded in 15 hydrometric stations in Mashhad and Neyshbour restricts and required maps were provided from the Regional Water Company of Khorasan Razavi, Iran. After drawing statistical bar graph period of suspended sediment, daily discharge, annual precipitation, and relatively adequate data, stations with the longest period and with the lowest deficit data were selected to determine the common statistical periods. Therefore, in this study, the time period of 1983-1984 to 2011-2012 was selected, and the run test was applied to control data quality and homogeneity. Then, the most effective factors of sediment yield were determined by principal component analysis (PCA) and Gamma Test (GT).Results and Discussion: The results of the principal component analysis showed that 90 percent of the first five components justify the changes. Among the factors, area and gross gradient of the mainstream from the first component, the average annual flow rate of mainstream, meandering waterways of the mainstream from second component, and drainage density of third component were identified as the most important influencing factors on suspended sediment production. Ninety superior combinations of 1500 proposed combinations were obtained by Gamma Test to evaluate the effects of each parameter on suspended sediment yield. To determine the order of importance of the entered parameters, first, Gamma Test was performed on all 12 parameters. Gamma values of all cases for each proposed combination were compared. The results showed that the impact of these statistics was lowered by eliminating high gamma parameters and the removal of low values. The data analysis revealed that the low levels of gamma and high accuracy of ratio to find the desired outputs from entries. By lowering the gradient, the complexity of the model was lowered and more suitable model was provided. As a result, high levels of gradient represented the complexity of the final model. The results of the percentage values of each of the 12 variables were considered among the superior equations for estimating the suspended sediment composition. In this regard, the mean annual discharge, main channel length, area, average annual rainfall, and percentage of the outcrop of erosion sensitive rocks with a total of 63 percent of the proposed equations were the most important factors affecting the sediment yield in the study area. The average height parameter of area, the average and gross slope of the mainstream had the lowest presence among the optimized compounds.Conclusion: Based on the results of the principal component analysis, the two factors of basin area and gross slope of the mainstream were selected as the most important factors affecting the amount of annual suspended sediment load, respectively. Based on the results of the Gamma Test, 12 main variables affecting suspended sediment load were identified and the effect of each of them on the production and transport of suspended sediment was determined. Based on the comparison of the results of the two methods of PCA and GT, it can be concluded that if the purpose of research or study is to prepare a model with the highest accuracy in estimating suspended sediment load, the 12-variable model of GT includes factors related to physiographical, geological, climatic and hydrological factors are suggested. However, if the preparation of a model with appropriate accuracy and a limited number of input variables is considered, a 5-variable model derived from the PCA method is proposed. At the same time, if the purpose is to prepare a model with the least input variables and their easy access and calculation and initial estimation of suspended sediments, a bivariate model (based on basin area and gross slope of the mainstream factors) resulting from PCA is proposed. According to the results of the present study, it can be concluded that the study of more parameters has provided grounds for evaluating their importance in sediment yield. Finally, due to the correlation of many parameters with each other, a limited number of parameters that have a more important role in suspended sediment estimation, were selected. Another finding of this study is the increase in the accuracy of the sediment model’s preparation due to achieving more important and effective parameters in sediment yield and identifying them in order to investigate the best sediment management measures in watersheds. It is suggested that similar research should be done in other watersheds with different conditions in terms of climatic conditions, topography, geology, and so on.
Irrigation
S.M. Saghebian
Abstract
Introduction: Sediment transportation and accurate estimation of its rate is a significant issue for river engineers and researchers. So far, various and complex relationships have been proposed to predict the amount of suspended sediment transport rate, such as velocity and critical shear stress based ...
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Introduction: Sediment transportation and accurate estimation of its rate is a significant issue for river engineers and researchers. So far, various and complex relationships have been proposed to predict the amount of suspended sediment transport rate, such as velocity and critical shear stress based equations. However, the complex nature of sediment transport and lack of validated models make it difficult to model the suspended sediment concentration and suspended sediment discharge carried by rivers. Although the developed models led to promising results in sediment transport prediction, due to the importance of sediment transport and its impact on hydraulic structures it is necessary to use other methods with higher efficiency. On the other hand, in recent years, the Meta model approaches have been applied in investigating the hydraulic and hydrologic complex phenomena. Hybrid models involving signal decomposition have also been shown to be effective in improving the prediction accuracy of time series prediction methods, as indicated in. Complementary Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition analysis is one of the widely used signal decomposition methods for hydrological time series prediction. Decomposition of time series reduces the difficulty of forecasting, thereby improving forecasting accuracy.In this study, due to the complexity of the sediment and erosion phenomenon and the effect of different parameters in estimating, time series pre-processing methods along with support vector machine (SVM) and Gaussian process regression (GPR) kernel based approaches were used to estimate suspended sediment load of a natural river at two consecutive hydrometric stations. For this purpose, different models were defined based on hydraulic and sediment particles characteristics. Moreover, the capability of integrated pre-processing and post-processing methods in two states of inter-station and between-stations was investigated. First, the Wavelet Transform (WT) method was used for data pre-processing then, the high-frequency sub-series were selected and re-decomposed using the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). Finally, the most effective sub-series were imposed as inputs for kernel-based models. In addition, to assess the reliability of the superior model, Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis was used.The results showed that the GPR model had a desirable degree of uncertainty in modeling.Materials and Methods: In this study, data of two stations of Housatonic River was used. The distance between stations was approximately 50 km. The first station is located near Great Brighton, Massachusetts, and the second station is in Connecticut. The basin area for the stations is 282 and 634 square miles, respectively. The flow path is from the first station to the second station. SVM and GPR models are based on the assumption that adjacent observations should convey information about each other. Gaussian processes are a way of specifying a prior directly over function space. This is a natural generalization of the Gaussian distribution whose mean and covariance are a vector and matrix, respectively. Due to prior knowledge about the data and functional dependencies, no validation process is required for generalization, and GP regression models are able to understand the predictive distribution corresponding to the test input. Wavelet Transform (WT) uses a flexible window function (mother wavelet) in signal processing. The flexible window function can be changed over time according to the signal shape and compactness. After using WT, the signal will decompose into two approximations (large-scale or low-frequency component) and detailed (small-scale component) components. EEMD was proposed to solve the mode mixing issue of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) which specifies the true IMF as the mean of an ensemble of trials. Each trial consists of the decomposition results of the signal plus a white noise of finite amplitude. EMD can be used to decompose any complex signal into finite intrinsic mode functions and a residue, resulting in subtasks with simpler frequency components and stronger correlations that are easier to analyze and forecast. Another important feature of empirical model of decomposition is that it can be used for noise reduction of noisy time series, which can be effective in improving the accuracy of model predictions. In the uncertainty analysis method, two elements are used to test the robustness and to analyze the models uncertainty. The first one is the percentage of the studied outputs which are in the range of 95PPU and the next one is the average distance between the upper (XU) and lower (XL) uncertainty bands. In this regard, the considered model should be run many times (1000 times in this study), and the empirical cumulative distribution probability of the models be calculated. The upper and lower bands are considered 2.5% and 97.5% probabilities of the cumulative distribution, respectively.Results and Discussion: In order to evaluate and review the performance of the tested models and determine the accuracy of the selected models, three performance criteria named Correlation Coefficient (CC), Determination Coefficient (DC), and Root Mean Square Errors (RSME) were used. The obtained results indicated that the accuracy of the applied integrated models was higher than the single SVM and GPR models. The use of integrated methods decreased the error criteria between 20 to 25 %. The obtained results for the uncertainty analysis showed that in suspended sediment load modeling the observed and predicted values were within the 95 PPU band in most of the cases. Moreover, it was found that the amount of d-Factors for train and test datasets were smaller than the standard deviation of the observed data. Therefore, based on the results, it could be induced that the suspended sediment modeling via integrated WT-EEMD-GPR model led to an allowable degree of uncertainty.Conclusion: Comparison of the developed models’ accuracy revealed that integrated GPR and SVM models had higher performance compared with single GPR and SVM models in predicting the suspended sediment discharge. The use of these two methods approximately decreased the error criteria between 20 to 25 %. According to the results, for the models that were developed based on the station data, the model with the input parameters of Dwt, Dwt-1, and Dst-1 and in the case of investigating the relationship between the stations, the model with the input parameters of Dst-2, Dwt-1, and Dst-1 were superior models. Also, based on the uncertainty analysis, the integrated GPR model had an allowable degree of uncertainty in suspended sediment modeling. However, it should be noted that the used methods are data sensitive models. Therefore, further studies using data ranges out of this study and field data should be carried out to determine the merits of the models to estimate suspended sediment load in the real conditions of flow.
R. Ghobadian; H. Shekari
Abstract
Introduction: The concentration changes of suspended load along the river reach and the contributing factors are of importance for hydraulic and environmental engineers. The first step to calculate the concentration of suspended sediment load is determining the flow hydraulic characteristics along a ...
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Introduction: The concentration changes of suspended load along the river reach and the contributing factors are of importance for hydraulic and environmental engineers. The first step to calculate the concentration of suspended sediment load is determining the flow hydraulic characteristics along a river reach. Although most of flow in nature are unsteady, the quasi-steady flow condition was considered to be simple in this study and the water surface profile along the river reach with irregular cross sections was calculated by standard step-by-step method. In order to calculate suspended sediment load under non-equilibrium condition, the advection-diffusion equation with source term was numerically solved. In the present sediment model, ten discretization methods, five relations for calculating capacity of suspended sediment load, eight relations for diffusion coefficients and eight relations to calculate particle fall velocity were used and their effects on suspended sediment distribution along 18480 m of Gharasoo river were investigated.
Results and Discussion: The HEC-RAS model output was used to calibrate the present hydraulic model. The models were run with the conditions as same as Manning roughness coefficient and river geometry conditions. The results showed that the calculated water surface profile along the river reach by two models are completely overlapped each other. In other words, the present model has a very good accuracy to predict the water surface profile in the river reach. As most commercial 1-D models (same as HEC-RAS) only consider the equilibrium condition for sediment transport and the bed or total load sediment, comparing the results of present sediment model with them seems not to be reasonable. Therefore, to validate the present suspended sediment model and finding the best method of discretization, an especial shape concentration hydrograph was introduced to the present model as input hydrograph and the model was run when the source term has been deleted deliberately. The volume below the input concentration hydrograph and calculated hydrographs in different cross sections was compared to each other. Comparing the hydrographs showed that the maximum error in calculating the volume of concentration hydrograph with the input hydrograph was 0.029% implying that the model satisfies the conservation laws as well as reliable programing. Among ten discretization methods, the best method for discretization of the advection-diffusion equation was Van Leer's method with the least error compared to other methods. After validating the model, effect of five relations for calculating capacity of suspended sediment load was investigated. The results showed that using the Wife equation estimated the amount of suspended sediment higher than other equations. The Toffaletti equation also estimated suspended sediment load lower than other equation. Among eight particle fall velocity formulas, Stokes relationship estimated the fall velocity larger than other equations. Hence, the Stokes equation application decreases the possibility of suspending the sediment particles. However, employing Van Rijn and Zanke relationships resulted in a greater suspended sediment load distribution along the river reach. Among eight relationships for diffusion coefficients, Elder and the Kashifipour - Falconer equations exhibited the lowest and the highest amount of diffusion in the concentration hydrograph, respectively. Furthermore, the calculated suspended sediment concentration under non-equilibrium conditions was 11.7 % higher than that under equilibrium conditions along the river reach.
Conclusion: Most 1-D numerical models only simulate the bed and total loads sediment transport under equilibrium condition while sediments are transported under non-equilibrium conditions in nature. Sediment transport under non- equilibrium conditions may be greater or lower than the equilibrium condition known as the capacity of sediment transport. In this research, a numerical model was developed to simulate the suspended sediment transport in a river reach under non-equilibrium conditions. The amount of suspended sediment concentration was calculated for each sediment grain size. The results showed that the distribution of suspended load along the river reach is not significantly sensitive to the fall velocity relations while the type of sediment transport equation affected the suspended sediment transport concentration. The concentration of suspended sediments for non-equilibrium conditions was also 11.7% higher than the concentration of sediments in equilibrium condition.
