Simulation of Temporal Development of Scour Hole Around an Wing-wall Abutment Using Gene Expression Programming

Abutments are widely used structures for protecting outer banks of river bends and its stabilization projects. Temporal variation of scour hole around an abutment, and the determination of equilibrium scour depth in designing and applying abutments are very important. Nowadays, several empirical relationships for predicting temporal variation of scour hole depth at abutment are presented. In the recent decade, due to ability of complex phenomena modeling, the artificial intelligent methods have very wide applications in many fields of water engineering. Geneexpression programming, a branch of evolutionary algorithms, is able to optimize the model structure and its components. In this study, using gene-expression programming, temporal development of scour hole around a wing-wall abutment has been simulated and compared with experimental data. By considering effective parameters in temporal development of scour around the abutment using dimensional analysis, the dimensionless parameters of e t / t and c V/V have been selected as independent variables a / L, b/ L, c / L and ds / dse parameters as dependent variables. Comparison of results of gene-expression programming with experimental data show that geneexpression programming is able to simulate the process of temporal development of scour hole and depth, very well.