Abstract
The novelty of the present study is to investigate the parameters that depict the scour hole characteristics caused by turbulent wall jets and develop new mathematical relationships for them. Four significant parameters i.e., depth of scouring, location of scour depth, height of the dune and location of dune crest are identified to represent a complete phenomenon of scour hole formation. From the gamma test, densimetric Froude number, apron length, tailwater level, and median sediment size are found to be the key parameters that affect these four dependent parameters. Utilizing the previous data sets, Multi Regression Analysis (linear and non-linear) has been performed to establish the relationships between the dependent parameters and influencing independent parameters. Further, artificial neural network-particle swarm optimisation (ANN-PSO) and gene expression programming (GEP) based models are developed using the available data. In addition, results obtained from these models are compared with proposed regression equations and the best models are identified employing statistical performance parameters. The performance of the ANN-PSO model (RMSE = 1.512, R(2) = 0.605), (RMSE = 6.644, R(2) = 0.681), (RMSE = 6.386, R(2) = 0.727) and (RMSE = 1.754, R(2) = 0.636) for predicting four significant parameters are more satisfactory than that of regression and other soft computing techniques. Overall, by analysing all the statistical parameters, uncertainty analysis and reliability index, ANN-PSO model shows good accuracy and predicts well as compared to other presented models.