Numerical and Experimental Modeling of Levee Breach Including Slumping Failure of Breach Sides
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 144, Issue 2
Abstract
The overtopping failure of noncohesive earthen levees was investigated by considering sediment transport by flowing water and including slumping failure due to slope instability. The breach-shape evolution and breach hydrograph were measured during laboratory experiments. The experiments were performed with different inlet discharges and downstream boundary conditions. Detailed levee breach experimental results are presented, which may be used by other researchers to verify their computer models. A two-dimensional, finite-difference numerical model was developed, which solves the shallow-water equations along with the sediment-mass-conservation equation, in which a new source term is included to account for slumping failure. First, the hydrodynamic part of the model was validated against a steady flow through a levee breach. The predicted and the measured results are in good agreement in terms of the water depth and flow velocity within the main channel and the breach area. Then, the numerical model, which includes the modified sediment-mass-conservation equation, was validated by comparing the results with the test data of overtopping failure of a noncohesive earthen levee. The model successfully predicted the breach characteristics (i.e., breach-shape evolution and breach hydrograph). Moreover, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to study the effects of different model parameters on breach shape. It was observed that the breach dimensions (i.e., top width and maximum depth) are directly proportional to the Manning roughness coefficient and to the coefficient of the Meyer-Peter Müller formula. As the sediment repose angle increases, the breach top width decreases and the maximum depth of the breach increases.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Egyptian Cultural and Educational Bureau for supporting the first author for his graduate studies. Funding from the National Science Foundation under the PIRE program (Grant No. OISE 0730246) is gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank the Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) program at the University of South Carolina for assistance in running the simulations in this paper. The authors express their thanks to Dr. Lindsey Ann LaRocque for assistance in measuring water depths using the Baumer. The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, which have significantly improved the quality of the paper.
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Published In
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 144 • Issue 2 • February 2018
Copyright
©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 20, 2016
Accepted: Jul 19, 2017
Published online: Dec 12, 2017
Published in print: Feb 1, 2018
Discussion open until: May 12, 2018
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