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Simulation of the full‐process dynamics of floating vehicles driven by flash floods

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journal contribution
posted on 2025-05-06, 09:13 authored by Yan Xiong, Qiuhua LiangQiuhua Liang, Jinhai Zheng, Gang Wang, Xue TongXue Tong

Flash flooding has become more prominent under climate change, threatening people's life and property. Post‐event investigations of recent events emphasize the role of floating debris, such as vehicles, in exacerbating damage. Few modeling methods and tools have been developed to simulate the full‐process dynamics of floating debris driven by large‐scale flood waves in real world. In this work, a fully coupled model is developed for simulating the full‐process interactive movements of vehicles driven by flash flood hydrodynamics, from entrainment, transport to deposition. The proposed coupled modeling system consists of a finite volume shock‐capturing hydrodynamic model solving the 2D shallow water equations and a 3D discrete element method (DEM) model. The proposed two‐way coupling approach estimates the hydrostatic and hydrodynamic forces acting on solid objects using the water depth and velocity predicted by the hydrodynamic model; the resulting counter forces on the fluid flow are then considered by adding extra source terms in the hydrodynamic model. A multi‐sphere method is further embedded in the DEM model to better represent vehicle shapes. New calculation modules are further implemented to represent the vehicle entrainment, contact and stopping motions. The coupled model is applied to reproduce a flash flood event hit Boscastle in the UK in 2004. Over 100 vehicles were moved and carried downstream by the highly transient flood flow. The model well predicts the hydrodynamics, interactive transport process and the final locations of vehicles. The proposed coupled model provides a new tool for simulating large‐scale flash flooding processes, including debris dynamics.


Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 52101307)

PYRAMID: Platform for dYnamic, hyper-resolution, near-real time flood Risk AssessMent Integrating repurposed and novel Data sources

UK Research and Innovation

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History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Water Resources Research

Volume

60

Issue

10

Publisher

Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. (AGU)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acceptance date

2024-08-20

Publication date

2024-10-08

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

0043-1397

eISSN

1944-7973

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Qiuhua Liang. Deposit date: 4 December 2024

Article number

e2023WR036739