Practical Channel Hydraulics

Practical Channel Hydraulics is a technical guide for estimating flood water levels in rivers using the innovative software known as the Conveyance and Afflux Estimation System (CES-AES). This is freely available at HR Wallingford’s website www.river-conveyance.net. The conveyance engine has also been embedded within industry standard river modelling packages such as InfoWorks RS and Flood Modeller Pro. This 2nd Edition has been greatly expanded through the addition of Chapters 6-8, which now supply the background to the Shiono and Knight Method (SKM), upon which the CES-AES is largely based.

With the need to estimate river levels more accurately, computational methods are now frequently embedded in flood risk management procedures, as for example in ISO 18320 (‘Determination of the stage-discharge relationship’), in which both the SKM and CES feature. The CES-AES incorporates five main components: A Roughness Adviser, A Conveyance Generator, an Uncertainty Estimator, a Backwater Module and an Afflux Estimator. The SKM provides an alternative approach, solving the governing equation analytically or numerically using Excel, or with the short Fortran program provided.

Special attention is paid to calculating the distributions of boundary shear stress distributions in channels of different shape, and to appropriate formulations for resistance and drag forces, including those on trees in floodplains. Worked examples are given for flows in a wide range of channel types (size, shape, cover, sinuosity), ranging from small scale laboratory flumes (Q = 2.0 ls^-1) to European rivers (~2,000 m³s^-1), and large-scale world rivers (> 23,000 m³s^-1), a ~ 10⁷ range in discharge. Sites from rivers in the UK, France, China, New Zealand and Ecuador are considered.

Topics are introduced initially at a simplified level, and get progressively more complex in later chapters. This book is intended for post graduate level students and practising engineers or hydrologists engaged in flood risk management, as well as those who may simply just wish to learn more about modelling flows in rivers.

Professor Donald Knight retired from the University of Birmingham in December 2007, after teaching and undertaking research in the Department of Civil Engineering for just over 39 years. He continues research as an Emeritus Professor at Birmingham. He has co-authored several books and published over 160 refereed journal and conference papers on open channel flow, modelling, boundary shear stress, sediment mechanics and flooding, including several review articles. He holds an Honorary Chair at Sichuan University, China (1994-2010) and received the Jinding Award and medal for ‘outstanding work for the worthy cause of construction and development of Sichuan’ by the Foreign Affairs Office, Sichuan (1999). The link between Professor Knight and the State Key Hydraulics Laboratory at Sichuan University, Chengdu, began in 1990, and is still active. He is assistant Editor of the Journal of Disaster Research (Tokyo University) and of Water and Sediment Erosion Research (Beijing & Tsinghua Universities), and has served on the Editorial panel of the Journal of Water Management (Institution of Civil Engineers).
He was Chairman of the EPSRC/EA Strategic Advisory Board for the Flood Risk Management Research Consortium (FRMRC), advising the management committee on the scientific status of the programme (￡8.7M, 2008-2011). He is currently a member of the British Standards Institution (BSI) committee CPI/113 on flow measurement, as well as two BSI technical sub-committees on flow measurement. He was national UK co-ordinator for SERC (forerunner of EPSRC) in hydraulics, pollution control and public health engineering (1984-90) and Programme manager for the Flood Channel Facility (1986-91). He was a member of the European Commission Study Panel on hydraulics (1990-91), the defra & Environment Agency ‘Theme Advisory Group’ on ‘Fluvial processes’ (1999-2004), and a co-author of the defra/EA ‘Vision concerning the hydraulics knowledge base required in river engineering and associated research needs’ (Knight & Ramsbottom, 2005). He was a member of the Presidential Commission of the Institution of Civil Engineers, set up by Secretary of State to review technical approaches to flood risk management in England and Wales in 2000/01, leading to the ‘Learning to live with Rivers’ report (2001).