Optimizing Hydraulic Design parameters for Irrigation Settling Basin

The management of sediments in river basins and waterways has been an important issue for water managers throughout history. Water Engineers and managers are faced with similar challenges caused by siltation of water reservoirs and irrigation water conveyance systems. As a copping strategy to counter the low irrigation application efficiency, designs of settling tanks are typically oversized. This is aimed at having enough detention time for the sediment particles to settle. This process is costly and tedious hence this book is aimed at optimizing the hydraulic design parameters for settling basins with an intention of addressing such challenges. Artificial Neural Networks in MATLAB was used to build ANN models for predicting sediment settlement and eventually optimizing the hydraulic parameters of settling basins. The ANN was used to develop the relation between sediment settlement and different inflows by changing the different number of neurons in hidden layer. The developed simulated results were evaluated using recommended quantitative statistical analysis that compared the measured and the predicted data.