No abstract

No abstract

An issue in the design of combined sewer overflow storage tunnels is to avoid "geysering" which is an air/water mixture blowing up through vertical shafts connected to the tunnel. Studies indicate that the origin of this phenomenon is the entrapment of large air pockets as the rapidly filling tunnel undergoes a transition between free surface and pressurized flow. Commonly implemented numerical models are of the shock fitting type that tracks the location of a pipe filling bore. However, the flow regime transition does not have to occur through a pipe filling bore. Another possibility involves a free surface bore with a following gradual transition to a full pipe condition. Large air volumes may be trapped in this situation following the bore reflection off a tunnel transition if this reflection closes the flow cross-section. Experimental observations are presented to demonstrate both types of flow regime transition. Traditional shock fitting methods are ill-equipped to accurately simulate gradual flow regime transitions. The shock capturing method proposed by Vasconcelos et al. (J Hydraul Eng 132(6):553-562, 2006) is demonstrated to be capable of resolving both types of observed bores.

The Santa Barbara post-wildfire debris flows and the Brumadinho tailing-dam failure were two of the most catastrophic flood events of the late 2010s. Both these events carried so much solid-phase material, that classic, clear-water, flood risk approaches cannot replicate them, or forecast other events like them. This case study applied the new non-Newtonian features in HEC-RAS 6.1 to these two events, testing the most widely used flood risk model on the two most common mud and debris flow hazards (post-wildfire floods and mine tailing dam failures). HEC-RAS reproduced the inundation boundaries and the event timing (where available) for both events. The ratio between the largest debris flow clasts and the channel size, parametric trade-offs, the “convex” alluvial plain topography, and the stochasticity introduced by urban infrastructure made the Santa Barbara modeling more difficult and less precise than Brumadinho. Despite these challenges, the results provide prototype scale validation and verification of these new tools in this widely applied flood risk model.

No abstract