M. van Damme
Please Note
17 records found
1
Methods have been developed to predict how hydrodynamic loads acting on nearly saturated porous media are transmitted to the subsoil. In line with the effective stress principle of Terzaghi, these methods apply the boundary conditions that the effective stresses at the surface of a porous medium are zero, and that the pore water pressures carry the full load. Here, a new approach is presented which is based on defining a stress and a stress gradient as boundary conditions. The stress gradient follows from the momentum balance equation, thereby assuring that the solution abides by d'Alembert's principle of minimization of virtual work. The corresponding solution is in full accordance with the volume and momentum balance equations of the linear elastic soil matrix and the volume and momentum balance equations of the pore water across the computational domain. The new method is thereby able to correctly reproduce measurements of pore pressure changes due to hydrodynamic loads under the assumption of a porous medium consisting of incompressible particles and pore water which could either be compressible or incompressible. The advantage of the proposed method is that it requires one less boundary condition at the surface of the porous medium. The method is therefore able to predict the magnitude of the effective stresses on a soil surface. Due to the ability to retain the assumption of incompressible water, the method has also become independent on a calibration parameter. The results of the method induce questions with respect to the validity of Terzaghi's principle of effective stress at the boundary when porous media are subjected to hydrodynamic loads.
SAFELevee
Het verbeteren van de betrouwbaarheid van waterkeringen door een beter begrip van de faalmechanismen
A high quality safety assessment of levee systems requires a good prediction of when the grass cover of levees fail. Current methods relate the onset of failure to the peak in momentum or energy of the flow, instead of the peak in momentum transfer or energy transfer to the grass cover. The critical velocity necessary in the current methods is thereby difficult to quantify. In line with determining the peak in momentum transfer to the grass, here is shown that the onset of damage of the grass cover can be related to the peak normal stresses acting on the grass cover during wave overtopping. The peak in momentum transfer is thereby assumed to be located at the point of reattachment of the flow with the landside slope. The method is validated against the results of two wave overtopping experiments and benchmarked against the cumulative overload method. An advantage of this method is thereby that both the time and location of the onset of damage can be predicted.
Breach growth models are used to predict the breach dimensions and to estimate the flow through the breach. All assessed models pretty well succeed in this. However, starting from various premises and taking into account a (limited) set of different breaching mechanisms, the use of today’s state-of-the-art breach growth models is not entirely trouble free
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Breach growth models are used to predict the breach dimensions and to estimate the flow through the breach. All assessed models pretty well succeed in this. However, starting from various premises and taking into account a (limited) set of different breaching mechanisms, the use of today’s state-of-the-art breach growth models is not entirely trouble free