Studying the relationship between the hydraulic and geometry characteristics of labyrinth weirs based on the historical memory of reported data

Abstract

One of the effective ways to increase the efficiency of weirs is to use nonlinear weirs, such as labyrinth weir, which increases the flow capacity by increasing the length of the weir at a fixed width. Given the importance of precisely estimating the flow discharge coefficient of this type of weir and its impact on supplying the safety of water structures, in the present study, the flow coefficient of labyrinth weirs was estimated using data-driven models of Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), Classification And Regression Tree (CART), Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID), and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR). After the modeling process, the predicted results were compared with the observed values using statistical measures and diagnostic analysis. In this study, three input combinations of hydraulic parameters, including the total upstream hydraulic head of weir (HT), weir discharge (Q), and head to weir height (HT/P) were used as input vectors. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the models, the statistical indicators of Coefficient of Efficiency (CE), RMSE, MDE, and RSD were employed. The final results showed that the ELM method created with all potential input parameters (HT, Q, and HT/P) was highly accurate in determining flow discharge coefficient. Due to having the lowest error (CE = 0.8815, RMSE = 0.0370), it was selected as the superior model.