Modeling of Vertical Distribution of Suspended Sediment Concentration in Open Channel Turbulent Flows Using Fractional Differential Entropy

Abstract: Suspended sediment concentration and sediment transport heavily correlates to fluid behavior, thus proving it to be a lucrative field for exploration. Most of the existing deterministic and probabilistic methods proved to be complex with high computation cost. In this paper, we proposed a simpler yet accurate and cost effective concentration model using fractional entropy due to Ubriaco for continuous domain, termed as fractional differential entropy (FDE). We estimated the type I distribution of suspended sediment concentration along the vertical direction in open channels considering the dimensionless normalized concentration as a random variable and constructing an optimization problem using the FDE. The surface concentration is assumed to be zero throughout the study. We further validate our FDE based concentration distribution model through regression and error analysis using some selected experimental and field data. The results are compared with the existing concentration models, which show the superiority of the proposed model with respect to the aspects considered under this study.