Flood fragility analysis for bridges with multiple failure modes

Bridges are one of the most important infrastructure systems that provide public and economic bases for humankind. It is also widely known that bridges are exposed to a variety of flood-related risk factors such as bridge scour, structural deterioration, and debris accumulation, which can cause structural damage and even failure of bridges through a variety of failure modes. However, flood fragility has not received as much attention as seismic fragility despite the significant amount of damage and costs resulting from flood hazards. There have been few research efforts to estimate the flood fragility of bridges considering various flood-related factors and the corresponding failure modes. Therefore, this study proposes a new approach for bridge flood fragility analysis. To obtain accurate flood fragility estimates, reliability analysis is performed in conjunction with finite element analysis, which can sophisticatedly simulate the structural response of a bridge under a flood by accounting for flood-related risk factors. The proposed approach is applied to a numerical example of an actual bridge in Korea. Flood fragility curves accounting for multiple failure modes, including lack of pier ductility or pile ductility, pier rebar rupture, pile rupture, and deck loss, are derived and presented in this study.ope

Efficient numerical computation and experimental study of temporally long equilibrium scour development around abutment

YesFor the abutment bed scour to reach its equilibrium state, a long flow time is needed. Hence, the employment of usual strategy of simulating such scouring event using the 3D numerical model is very time consuming and less practical. In order to develop an applicable model to consider temporally long abutment scouring process, this study modifies the common approach of 2D shallow water equations (SWEs) model to account for the sediment transport and turbulence, and provides a realistic approach to simulate the long scouring process to reach the full scour equilibrium. Due to the high demand of the 2D SWEs numerical scheme performance to simulate the abutment bed scouring, a recently proposed surface gradient upwind method (SGUM) was also used to improve the simulation of the numerical source terms. The abutment scour experiments of this study were conducted using the facility of Hydraulics Laboratory at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore to compare with the presented 2D SGUM-SWEs model. Fifteen experiments were conducted over a total period of 3059.7 hours experimental time (over 4.2 months). The comparison shows that the 2D SGUM-SWEs model gives good representation to the experimental results with the practical advantage

Socially and biologically inspired computing for self-organizing communications networks

The design and development of future communications networks call for a careful examination of biological and social systems. New technological developments like self-driving cars, wireless sensor networks, drones swarm, Internet of Things, Big Data, and Blockchain are promoting an integration process that will bring together all those technologies in a large-scale heterogeneous network. Most of the challenges related to these new developments cannot be faced using traditional approaches, and require to explore novel paradigms for building computational mechanisms that allow us to deal with the emergent complexity of these new applications. In this article, we show that it is possible to use biologically and socially inspired computing for designing and implementing self-organizing communication systems. We argue that an abstract analysis of biological and social phenomena can be made to develop computational models that provide a suitable conceptual framework for building new networking technologies: biologically inspired computing for achieving efficient and scalable networking under uncertain environments; socially inspired computing for increasing the capacity of a system for solving problems through collective actions. We aim to enhance the state-of-the-art of these approaches and encourage other researchers to use these models in their future work

Reliability assessment in detention basin design

A flood detention basin is one of the structural measures used for the mitigation of floods. Its design consists of determining the required flood storage and the dimensions of bottom outlet(s) and overflow spillway. Hydraulic performance of a detention basin is dictated with the achievement of the desired degree of attenuation which is affected by storage and capacities of outlet facilities. In this paper, a reliability based model is presented for the preliminary design of flood detention basins having dual outlets using a static loading-resistance interference. In the analysis, loading and resistance of the system are assumed as the maximum lake elevation and the crest elevation of the embankment, respectively. By examining the relevant statistical information for some existing flood detention basins in Turkey, the lognormal probability density function is observed to represent the randomness of loading and resistance. Use of the model is illustrated on a case study and a set of relationships are derived among reliability, attenuation, safety factor, and return period for various entrance elevations of bottom outlet and length to crest elevation ratios of overflow spillway, With the execution of the model, various alternatives can be compared from hydraulic conformity, economy, and safety viewpoints

Effect of watershed partitioning on hydrologic parameters and estimation of hydrograph of an ungauged basin: a case study in Gokirmak and Kocanaz, Turkey

The main goal of this study is to investigate the effect of the size of the subbasins of a watershed on the hydrologic parameters and their spatial variability in an estimation of the hydrologic parameters and hydrograph of a neighbouring ungauged basin. In this paper, Hydrologic Engineering Center-Hydrologic Modelling System (HEC-HMS), a semi-distributed hydrologic model, is used to calibrate and cross-validate two flood events occurred in 1998 and then validate four other flood events occurred in 1991, 1994, 2002, and 2009 in Gokirmak Basin in Western Black Sea Region, Turkey. The basin is divided into seven different subbasins to investigate the effect of watershed partitioning on calibrated hydrologic parameters of each subbasin using the peak-weighted root mean square error method as an objective function and the hydrograph at the outlet of the whole basin. It is found out that as the geometric magnitudes of the subbasins changed, the calibrated values of the hydrologic parameters of those subbasins changed as well. Then, a neighbouring basin, Kocanaz, is considered as an assumed neighbouring ungauged basin to investigate the effect of watershed partitioning of a gauged basin on the estimation of hydrograph of a neighbouring ungauged basin. Hydrologic parameters and direct runoff hydrograph of assumed ungauged neighbouring basin are estimated from the hydrologic parameters of the HEC-HMS calibration results of Gokirmak. Statistical indicators of the simulation results for each basin partitioning were graded with respect to the boundary values of the simulation outputs to find the best alternative. The grading results show that the simulation results with a single basin gave better representation among all other partitioning except two flood events