Application of RAGA based on SA in calculating critical water depth of open channel

Critical depth of water is an important hydraulic parameter in open channel hydraulics, which is a key sign of distinguishing the flow state of water in open channel. The traditional methods for calculating critical water depth of open channel with trapezoidal section include the trial-and-error method, the approximate solution and the iteration method, which own shortcomings of large amount of calculation and rough accuracy. For this reason, the method of Accelerating Genetic Algorithm based on real coding (RAGA) was adopted in this paper to solve this problem. The Simulated Annealing algorithm (SA) was used to improve the convergence rate during the late of evolution of RAGA. Practicality and accuracy of RAGA were tested through calculating critical water depth of open channel with trapezoidal section in practice. The results of case showed that operating speed of RAGA was faster than SGA, its accuracy was higher than traditional methods, which demonstrates that the RAGA is a suitable method for calculating critical water depth with trapezoidal section.