Daniel Caviedes-Voullième

Reconstruction of 2D river beds by appropriate interpolation of 1D cross-sectional information for flood simulation

The 2D numerical simulation of river flow requires a large amount of topographic data to build an accurate Digital Terrain Model which must cover the main river channel and the area likely to be flooded. DTMs for large floodplains are often generated by LiDAR flights. However, it is often impossible to obtain LiDAR data of permanently inundated river beds. These areas are often surveyed and discrete cross-sections of the river channel are obtained. This work presents an algorithm to generate the missing information for the areas between cross-sections. The algorithm allows to generate a river bed which preserves important morphological features such as meanders and thalweg trajectory. Two benchmark cases are studied: a synthetic river-floodplain system and a real case application on a reach of the Ebro river in Spain. The cases are analyzed from a geometry and hydrodynamics perspective by performing 2D simulations with good results. This work describes an algorithm designed to reconstruct 2D river beds from 1D cross-section data.The algorithm is designed to interpolate the trajectory of the channel from the cross-section data, as well as the elevation.Tests show that the algorithm is well suited for 2D river bed reconstruction and allows to obtain good hydrodynamic simulations.

Multiwavelet-based grid adaptation with discontinuous Galerkin schemes for shallow water equations

We provide an adaptive strategy for solving shallow water equations with dynamic grid adaptation including a sparse representation of the bottom topography. A challenge in computing approximate solutions to the shallow water equations including wetting and drying is to achieve the positivity of the water height and the well-balancing of the approximate solution. A key property of our adaptive strategy is that it guarantees that these properties are preserved during the refinement and coarsening steps in the adaptation process.The underlying idea of our adaptive strategy is to perform a multiresolution analysis using multiwavelets on a hierarchy of nested grids. This provides difference information between successive refinement levels that may become negligibly small in regions where the solution is locally smooth. Applying hard thresholding the data are highly compressed and local grid adaptation is triggered by the remaining significant coefficients. Furthermore we use the multiresolution analysis of the underlying data as an additional indicator of whether the limiter has to be applied on a cell or not. By this the number of cells where the limiter is applied is reduced without spoiling the accuracy of the solution.By means of well-known 1D and 2D benchmark problems, we verify that multiwavelet-based grid adaptation can significantly reduce the computational cost by sparsening the computational grids, while retaining accuracy and keeping well-balancing and positivity.

2D dry granular free-surface flow over complex topography with obstacles. Part I

Avalanches, debris flows and other types of gravity-driven granular flows are a common hazard in mountainous regions. These regions often have human settlements in the lower parts of valleys, with human structures dangerously exposed to the destructive effects of these geophysical flows. Therefore a scientific effort has been made to understand, model and simulate geophysical granular flows. In order for computer models and simulations to be of predictive value they need to be validated under controlled, yet nature-like conditions. This work presents an experimental study of granular flow over a simplified mountain slope and valley topography. The experimental facility has a rough bed with very high slope at the upstream end and adverse slope on the downstream end, following a parabolic profile. Obstacles are present in the lower regions. Transient measurements of the moving granular surfaces were taken with a consumer-grade RGB-D sensor, providing transient 2D elevation fields around the obstacles. Three experimental configurations were tested, with semispheres of different diameters and a square dike obstacle. The experimental results are very consistent and repeatable. The quantitative, transient and two-dimensional data for all three experiments constitute excellent benchmarking tests for computational models, such as the one presented in a companion paper. A consumer grade RGB-D sensor is used to measure fast transient granular flow.Three highly transient granular flow experiments with obstacles are presented.The technique allows to acquire 2D transient results from the experiments with ease and low cost.The morphology of highly transient and local flow features such as shocks can be detailedly measured.

2D dry granular free-surface transient flow over complex topography with obstacles. Part II

Dense granular flows are present in geophysics and in several industrial processes, which has lead to an increasing interest for the knowledge and understanding of the physics which govern their propagation. For this reason, a wide range of laboratory experiments on gravity-driven flows have been carried out during the last two decades. The present work is focused on geomorphological processes and, following previous work, a series of laboratory studies which constitute a further step in mimicking natural phenomena are described and simulated. Three situations are considered with some common properties: a two-dimensional configuration, variable slope of the topography and the presence of obstacles. The setup and measurement technique employed during the development of these experiments are deeply explained in the companion work. The first experiment is based on a single obstacle, the second one is performed against multiple obstacles and the third one studies the influence of a dike on which overtopping occurs. Due to the impact of the flow against the obstacles, fast moving shocks appear, and a variety of secondary waves emerge. In order to delve into the physics of these types of phenomena, a shock-capturing numerical scheme is used to simulate the cases. The suitability of the mathematical models employed in this work has been previously validated. Comparisons between computed and experimental data are presented for the three cases. The computed results show that the numerical tool is able to predict faithfully the overall behavior of this type of complex dense granular flow.

Application of the Adjoint Method for the Reconstruction of the Boundary Condition in Unsteady Shallow Water Flow Simulation

Hydraulic phenomena in open-channel flows are usually described by means of the shallow water equations. This hyperbolic non-linear system can be used for predictive purposes provided that initial and boundary conditions are supplied and the roughness coefficient is calibrated. When calibration is required to fully pose the problem, several strategies can be adopted. In the present work, an inverse technique, useful for any of such purposes, based on the adjoint system and gradient descent is presented. It is used to find the optimal time evolution of the inlet boundary condition required to meet the 20 measured water depth data in an experimental test case of unsteady flow on a beach. The partial differential systems are solved using an upwind finite volume scheme. Several subsets of probes were selected and the quality of the reconstructed boundary tested against the experimental results. The results show that the adjoint technique is useful and robust for these problems, and exhibits some sensitivity to the choice of probes, which can be used to properly select probes in real applications.