RiverSoft
Rivers and streams are among the most beautiful, important and dangerous objects in nature, supplying water, hydroelectric power, transportation, recreation and inspiring some of the world's most beautiful poetry. We as an engineer must be able to predict the river's behavior in the interests of channel improvement and flood control to guard the biodiversity of nature both as flora and fauna and to save millions of dollars invested in the construction of hydraulic structures such as dams, bridges and canals by foreboding the criticality of their construction and environmental costs involved in the form of imbalances in natural cycles (nitrogen cycle, oxygen cycle, carbon cycle).
What we did?
Since the process of deriving an approximate physical model of a river is very complex in the form of non-linear differential equations involving huge number of flow variables from the roughness coefficient to parameters accounting to turbulence and secondary wave currents. In the present work we have derived an approximate mathematical model called RiverSoft under constraints of one dimension, the pressure in the vertical direction is hydrostatic, river bed is immovable etc. It involves major parameters guiding channel's flow and thus works in two dimensions of time and space. We have utilized the famous Saint Venant's Equation and applied the process of discretization to obtain the numerical solution that governs the propagation of a flood wave in natural rivers with the objective of a better understanding of its propagation.