Canals

A substantial part of the usable water may be lost as seepage from a canal. This book presents analytical solutions based on the inverse hodograph and Schwarz-Christoffel conformal transformation for computing seepage from polygon and curvilinear canals. These solutions have been simplified as explicit algebraic equations. The construction cost of network of canals constitutes a major cost item in an irrigation project and that should be minimized. Such a minimum cost canal design problem results in a non-linear objective function and a non-linear equality constraint, making the problem hard to solve analytically. A nonlinear optimization method has been applied to different shapes of canals and subsequently generalized explicit equations and section shape coefficients have been found through error minimization for the design of minimum cost canal sections. The analysis overcomes the complexity of the seepage from canals and minimum cost design of irrigation canal sections and thus the book should be useful to students, teachers, researchers and professionals interested in fields of canal design and operations.