Safety assessment of multifunctional flood defences

Type

PhD-research


Persons involved:

Juan Pablo Aguilar López (PhD-candidate)

S.J.M.H. Hulscher (Promotor)

J.J. Warmink (Supervisor)

R.M.J. Schielen (Supervisor)


Duration

2012-2016


Summary

Multifunctional flood defences (MFD’s) are being conceived and even implemented all over the world as an efficient solution for land scarcity and population growth. One of the main challenges for the implementation of MFDs, is to develop tools to assess their safety which comply with the actual safety philosophy and flood safety assessment guidelines for the Netherlands. The main objective of this research is to establish a methodology that allows to estimate the influence in the failure probability of a river flood defense when additional functions are embedded. The physical understanding of the embankment behavior for most of the main failure mechanisms during flood events, is explained by reliability functions derived from soil mechanics and porous media flow theory. The parameters used to evaluate this expressions might be correlated to a certain degree with the ones used for the risk analysis of the additional functions (e.g. road stability, house deformation). Therefore limit state equations can be re-written and re-validated based on common state variables of the system. With this new equations, the safety of structures can be assessed from models that are capable of including the additional structures , such as FEM models.