Self-organisation and entropy in the 2-D morphological modelling of an open channel

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Description/Abstract

A robust method has been developed to predict the two-dimensional morphology of sediment in a rectangular channel that contains a constriction, using self-organisation. This method overcomes the need to model the formation of dynamic equilibrium morphologies over time, which can lead to the amplification of small errors in each time step. This method will be of benefit to areas of coastal research such as the prediction of equilibrium formations behind a detached breakwater, and the formation of complex morphology in an estuary. This paper includes a comparison of a number of different methods and objective function formulae and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. It concludes that the self-organisation method compares favourably to a process-based method and a laboratory study, and outperforms extrema hypotheses methods.