NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF FLOODING OF REAL-TOPOGRAPHY DEVELOPED AREAS FOLLOWING RIVER EMBANKMENT FAILURE

Abstract

The paper concerns numerical simulations of flood wave propagation in an urban area resulting from a river embankment failure. Simulations have been performed to predict and analyze the parameters of flash and catastrophic flow in a developed area with the aim of presenting numerical calculations useful for identification of inundation zones. The shallow water equations were assumed as the mathematical model of free-surface unsteady water flow. A numerical scheme of the finite volume method was applied to solve the model equations and the Roe method used to approximate the mass and momentum fluxes. Two test cases of embankment failure are investigated in the paper. The aim of one experiment is to simulate a flood in a model city area, where a group of buildings representing a simplified urban configuration was introduced. In order to verify the calculations, numerical results were examined against experimental data available from laboratory measurements. An experiment of the model city’s flooding event was carried out at the hydraulic laboratory of the Gdansk University of Technology. The other test case concerns flash flood simulation on an embanked developed area of real topography.