Reliability Analysis of the Ancient Nezahualcoyotl's Dike

Reliability Analysis of the Ancient Nezahualcoyotl's Dike: Investigating Failure Due to Overflow Using an Improved Hydrological Model

Mendoza Lugo, M.A. (TU Delft Hydraulic Structures and Flood Risk)
Torres Alves, G.A. (TU Delft Hydraulic Structures and Flood Risk)
Morales Napoles, O. (TU Delft Hydraulic Structures and Flood Risk)

Brito, Mário P. (editor)
Aven, Terje (editor)
Baraldi, Piero (editor)
Čepin, Marko (editor)
Zio, Enrico (editor)

2023

Investigating the reliability of ancient hydraulic structures constructed without modern probabilistic criteria allows an understanding of why and how the structure fails. In this paper, we present an extended method, firstly introduced by Torres-Alves and Morales-Nápoles (2020), to perform the reliability analysis of the Nezahualcoyotl's dike that was designed (most likely) without probabilistic criteria. The dike was built around 1450 by the Aztec empire dividing Lake Texcoco from north to south (present-day Mexico City). We estimate the probability of failure due to overflow. By using a discrete time-state Markov chain and bi-variate copulas to generate large synthetic observations of the environmental variables precipitation and evaporation. In addition to the previous methodology, two sources of uncertainty were taken into account (i) the characterization of the environmental conditions during the dry season to estimate initial water levels on the lake and (ii) the influence of surface runoff and subsurface seepage losses on the water levels. The extended method allows for better characterization of the lacustrine system. Therefore an improved extent of the hydrology of the system and a more reliable estimation of the probability of failure of Nezahualcoyotl's dike are presented.

Dike
copulas
Markov chains
water budget

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a3875112-e29b-4bb2-9639-bc9ac206d45b

https://doi.org/10.3850/978-981-18-8071-1_p279-cd

Research Publishing

2024-03-08

Proceedings of the 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference

The 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023), 2023-09-03 → 2023-09-07, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2023 M.A. Mendoza Lugo, G.A. Torres Alves, O. Morales Napoles