University of Washington team leverages the NHERI at OSU wave flume
Published on June 11, 2021
In tsunamis, waves and water are not the only destructive forces. As post-tsunami photos
University of Washington team leverages the NHERI at OSU wave flume
Published on June 11, 2021
In tsunamis, waves and water are not the only destructive forces. As post-tsunami photos show, water-borne debris causes major damage. Floating in masses called “debris fields,” these buffeting objects can be as large as cars, boats, even whole buildings. The objects crash into structures and create dams — leading to more problems.
A University of Washington research team is building a numerical approach for understanding — and predicting — the highly nonlinear, chaotic nature of these flow-driven tsunami debris fields. The team’s pilot experiments confirmed that tsunami debris flows are indeed random systems: nearly identical initial conditions lead to widely varying outcomes of debris flow. In short, the behavior of tsunami debris is extremely difficult to predict.
In tackling this substantial challenge, the UW team seeks to provide a numerical tool for the natural hazards engineering community to understand and predict tsunami debris flow.
The pilot tests took place at the Oregon State University's OH Hinsdale Wave Laboratory, part of the NSF-funded Natural Hazard Engineering Research Infrastructure, NHERI. In the spring of 2021, the team returned to the NHERI at OSU experimental facility and generated a robust dataset. They’ll use it to create models for quantifying and validating debris impact forces and damming effects.