Fully Hydrodynamic Coupled Simulation of Surface Flows in Irrigation Furrow Networks

Abstract

Saint-Venant equations are accurately solved by a fully implicit solution, and a numerical model for furrow water flow is proposed with unconditional stability. Furthermore, this numerical model is extended to furrow networks. There are continuous hydraulic connections among multiple furrows by network junctions, thus the surface water flows of all furrows in a furrow network are simultaneously simulated. Then, a fully hydrodynamic coupled model with unconditional stability is constructed for furrow networks. The dam-break problem with an analytical solution is first used to test the proposed model, and a good performance with different time steps is obtained. Meanwhile, two field-scale experiments for a furrow network are selected to validate the proposed model. The validated results show that the proposed model can well simulate water flows of a furrow network and presents good mass conservation ability. Meanwhile, the computational efficiency of the proposed model can satisfy the requirement of irrigation application.