River Research Institute, West Bengal.
The question of improvement of tidal rivers is usually investigated with the help of hydraulic scale models, since direct mathematical treatment is not possible owing to the complicated structure of the mathematics of tidal mechanics. However, there are certain inherent limitations of tidal models which make their operation more difficult than models of non-tidal rivers. This naturally affects the results obtained from the model experiments to some extent. There is, however, no other way of verifying these results. This has encouraged attempts at mathematical treatments with the help of simplified approximation of the channel contour, and methods of mathematical computation of the tidal propagation have been evolved in different countries, especially in the Netherlands where the sea and the tidal action are of profound importance, of the different methods vf computation the iteration method has been found to be particularly useful and has been applied successfully for computations of many rivers. This paper gives in brief, an idea of the simplifications introduced, the different methods of solution and their applications. In particular, the solution by the iteration method and its practical application have been discussed.
