| Abstract |
The ultimate goal of PRECISE is to aid engineers, planners and other relevant stakeholders to take decisions regarding the design and implementation of mitigation measures to protect population, civil infrastructures and the environment under outstanding water flow events induced by natural hazards (floods, spills, tsunamis etc). This will be achieved through the development and experimental validation of a new generation of mathematical models and computational methods for the study of natural hazards involving flows with particles of different sizes (hereafter called particulate flows) and their interaction and damaging effects on structures and landscape.
These computational methods will allow to solve Particulate-Fluid-Structure-Interaction (PFSI) problems to obtain an accurate and reliable prediction of the behaviour of landscape and constructions under extreme water hazards. The constructions of interest are dams, dykes, breakwaters, buildings, bridges and similar structures. The natural hazards considered include flash floods generated by heavy rain, or water overspills due to the collapse of dams, dykes and reservoirs under landslides and earthquakes, as well as slurry flows and tsunami flows, among others. Despite the research deployed in this field in the last few decades, the study of the deformation and failure of a construction and the erosion of a landscape area under a particulate water stream is still far from being a real possibility using the currently available computational resources. This is due to the lack of a multidisciplinary approach that can integrate different expertise (hydraulic, geotechnical and structural) for the development of reliable computational models for predicting structural failure and soil erosion under particulate flows accounting for particle-fluid-structure interactions. The PRECISE research and working team is composed of civil engineers with different expertices: hydraulic, geotechnical, structural, all experts in computational mechanics. In PRECISE we will develop and integrate continuous, particle and discrete numerical techniques based on the research conducted during the last years by the principal investigators on an innovative combination of particle-based methods (such as the first and second generation of the Particle Finite Element Method, PFEM and PFEM2 respectively, the Material Point Method, MPM) and the Finite Element Method (FEM) and, in particular, on the blending of these techniques with the Discrete Element Method (DEM). The starting point of the research will be the numerical methods for fluid-soil-structure interaction developed by the proposers group in tha last 6 years. In PRECISE we will extend the capabilities of these numerical procedures in terms of the range of applications and numerical efficiency, among other features.
The practical objectives of the research are:
a) the development of a new generation of lagrangian computaional methods for analysis of particulate flows,
b) the solution of particle fluid structure interaction problems involving soil erosion and structural failure.
In the project we will validate the numerical methods using both laboratory tests on scale models of structures and landscape under controlled particulate flows and data from real flooding events available in the literature. |