RESERVOIR SIMULATION FOR WATER CONSERVATION

Abstract

The comprehensive planning of irrigation projects considering the various aspects related to them is of primary concern for an overall increase in the efficiencies of these projects which have been subjected to much criticism. Planning and management of the water resources and then efficient distribution of the available water in the fields for an increased agricultural production are the two major objectives which should be met to make an irrigation project successful. A number of simulation and optimization models have been developed and applied to derive planning and operating strategies for large irrigation reservoir projects over longer intervals of time (generally monthly). Application of optimization techniques to reservoir operation has become a major focus of water resources planning and management. Traditionally, reservoir operation is based on heuristic procedures, embracing rule curves and, to a certain extent, subjective judgments by the operator. Water use involves a large number of stakeholders with different objectives, and optimization techniques are expected to provide balanced solutions between often conflicting objectives. The thesis proposes an avenue for changing traditional reservoir operation into optimized strategies, taking advantage of the rapid development in computational techniques. The main contribution of the thesis is the development of a framework in which a simulation model is coupled with a numerical search method for optimizing decision variables specifically defined for operation of the reservoir. The MATLAB program is adopted for simulating the various components of the reservoir to obtain the near optimum values of the design variables. The systematic search would be used for sampling the set of data. The framework is tested on the Harbhangi Irrigation Project is an inter-basin irrigation project in Orissa state, constructed across river Harbhangi considering irrigation water supplied to the farms on rotational basis. The results show that simulation models have proved extremely useful in achieving the optimal design in reservoir planning. To further improve the operation, real-time optimization is performed taking real-time and forecast information about reservoir levels, -reservoir inflows and water demands into account. The analysis demonstrates that the real-time optimization procedure improves the performance and enhances the flexibility of the 'reservoir operation in comparison to a strict application of the optimized regulation.