Feasibility study of Fluvial Acoustic Tomography System for flood monitoring and determination of the measurement accuracy, minimum and maximum measurement ranges

Flood monitoring and accurate measurement of flood wave are important in order to flood management. Acoustic tomography (AT) technique is one of the best technologies that is widely being used to monitor streamflow and flood wave measurement. In this method, the flow characteristics are measured by the reciprocal sound transmission of two AT systems where are deployed on both sides of the rivers. In this study, the calculation of minimum and maximum operational ranges, as well as the accuracy of velocity measurement is investigated for the river with different widths. The results illustrated that the minimum operational range with using 7th order M Sequence is 19 meters that would have the lowest velocity resolution of 20 cm/s. In this technique, the velocity resolution improves in proportion to the increment of the operational range. Therefore, the accuracy of 100 and 200-meter ranges are 3.5 and 2 cm/s, respectively. The maximum operational range using 12th order M Sequence is about 1955 meter with the precision of 0.2 cm/s. Due to the previous studies of using AT technique for the purpose of flood monitoring, as well as the result of this research that evaluated the capability of 30-kHz AT system, the proposed system can provide the real-time and accurate flood data in wide rivers. The real-time flood data may be used by water resources decision makers.