Summary:
The failure of dams and dikes cause loss of lives and severe property damage. In the context of climate changes and dam decommissioning, it is reckless not to invest on a new generation of experts on dam and dike breach risks and on a new generation of mathematical simulation tools.
Embankment failure by overtopping have been object of several laboratorial studies which have helped characterizing the main modes of erosion and provided mass balances of the reservoir of the breached embankment.  However, the greatest single source of uncertainty in forecasting the extent and arrival time of dam and dike breach flood still comes from the breach discharge hydrograph and thus from the lack of knowledge of breaching processes. At the current state-of-the-art, it is known what happens at large embankment scales but not how it happens at small scales. Recent advances in visualization of dam-breach flows, characterization of hydrodynamics of breaching dams and in numerical modelling pave open the way for a new generation of simulation tools.
The objectives of the project are to build an integrated conceptual framework for embankment breaching, comprising hydraulics and soil mechanics, and a new generation 3D numerical simulation of fluid-sediment mixtures. To pursue these objectives, the work-program articulates theoretical, laboratorial and computational tasks. Major innovations include:
i) Realistic geotechnical behaviour of tested embankments, provided by a careful choice of the materials (cohesive and non-cohesive soil);
ii) novel instrumentation, visualization and measuring techniques for test monitoring that allow for detailed information on the geotechnical and hydrodynamic phenomena (velocities in the breach near field; breach evolution; slope erosion process);

LNEC
HYADRAULICS AND ENVIRONMENT DEPARTMENT
GEOTECHNICS DEPARTMENT