Probabilistic Assessment of Tsunami Forces on Coastal Structures

在过去十年中，海啸已造成数十万人死亡，并给世界各地的沿海社区造成数千亿美元的损失。 虽然一段时间内没有发生大海啸，但太平洋沿岸面临重大风险，最近的风暴潮事件显示，国内基础设施可能受到类似东亚和太平洋地区的破坏。 对结构设计海啸荷载预测的兴趣已经增长，但很难开发出准确预测单个结构的海啸荷载响应的模型，更不用说特定区域内多个结构的海啸风险了。 这里提出的框架旨在提高沿海结构的安全性和可持续性，从而改善海啸灾害评估、灾后应对和恢复工作。 最终，这项工作将通过提高公众对这类灾害构成的风险的认识和加强开发抗灾基础设施系统的工具，使社区更加安全。 计算能力的提高促进了海啸-结构相互作用建模的新数值方法的发展，这些方法旨在以高分辨率和高精度捕获特定的物理现象，包括耦合多物理场模型来模拟复杂的系统相互作用。 如果要实现针对具体社区的结构脆弱性评估，就必须基于对这些相互作用的基本理解，以及在概率框架内有效模拟相关物理过程的能力，该框架说明了这些事件的不确定性。 该研究项目的主要目标是建立一个开源的建模框架，其中3D计算流体动力学求解器可以有效地用于为现有的广泛使用的洪水模型提供载荷预测能力的发展信息，并开发一个概率框架，用于预测社区水平上沿海结构的流体载荷和结构响应。 研究小组将根据现有的实验数据验证这一框架，评估水深测量和社区布局对水流的影响，改进模型以包括力量预测，并将概率海啸危险评估方法扩展到包括流体载荷标准。 这项工作将为用户提供必要的框架和软件工具，以开发特定地点的数值模型，以提高我们对海啸事件对这些结构造成的概率风险的理解，从而提高沿海结构的安全性和可持续性。

In the last decade, tsunamis have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to coastal communities around the world. While a major tsunami has not impacted the United States in some time, there is significant risk to the Pacific Coast and recent storm surge events have shown a potential for damage to domestic infrastructure similar to what was seen in East Asia and the Pacific. Interest in tsunami load predictions for structural design has grown, but it is difficult to develop models that accurately predict the tsunami load response of an individual structure, much less the tsunami risk for multiple structures within a specific region. The framework presented here is designed to improve the safety and sustainability of coastal structures and, consequently, improve tsunami hazard assessments, post-event response, and recovery efforts. Ultimately, this work will result in safer communities through increased public awareness of the risks posed by these types of hazards and enhanced tools to develop resilient infrastructure systems. Increased computing power has prompted the development of novel numerical approaches to tsunami-structure interaction modeling tailored to capture specific physical phenomena with high-levels of resolution and accuracy, including coupled multiphysics models to simulate complex system interactions. If community-specific assessments of structural vulnerabilities are to be achieved, they must be based on a fundamental understanding of these interactions and an ability to efficiently model the associated physical processes in a probabilistic framework that accounts for the uncertain nature of these events. The primary goals of this research project are to establish an open-source modeling framework where 3D computational fluid dynamics solvers can be used efficiently to inform the development of load-prediction capabilities for existing, widely used inundation models and to develop a probabilistic framework for predicting the fluid loading and structural response of coastal structures at a community level. The research team will validate this framework against existing experimental data, assess the effects of bathymetry and community layout on flow, refine the models to include force predictions, and extend probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment methods to include fluid loading criteria. This work will provide users both the framework and the software tools necessary to develop site-specific numerical models to increase the safety and sustainability of coastal structure by improving our understanding of the probabilistic risk posed by tsunami events on these structures.