Prediction of erosional rates for cohesive sediments in annular flume experiments using artificial neural networks

Artificial neural network is used to predict development of suspended sediment concentration in annular flume experiments on cohesive sediment erosion. Natural sediment for the experiments was taken from the River Rhine and subjected to a consecutive increase in the bed shear stress. The development of the suspended particulate matter (SPM) was measured and then utilized for artificial neural network training, validation, and testing, including independent testing on new data sets. Several network configurations were examined, in particular, with and without autoregressive input. Additionally, relative importance of auxiliary physical-chemical parameters was analyzed. Artificial neural network with autoregressive input showed very high precision in the SPM prediction for all independent test cases achieving average mean squared error 0.034 and regression value 0.998. It was found that for an abundant training sample, the SPM parameter itself is enough to obtain high quality prediction. At the same time, physical-chemical parameters may provide some improvement to the artificial neural network prediction in cases that comprise values unprecedented in the training sample.