Probabilistic Assessment of Tsunami Forces on Coastal Structures

在过去的十年里，海啸给世界各地的沿海社区造成了数十万人死亡和数千亿美元的损失。虽然大海啸在一段时间内没有影响到美国，但对太平洋沿岸存在重大风险，最近的风暴潮事件表明，国内基础设施可能受到类似于东亚和太平洋地区的破坏。人们对结构设计中的海啸荷载预测越来越感兴趣，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。本文提出的框架旨在提高沿海建筑的安全性和可持续性，从而改善海啸危害评估、灾后反应和恢复工作。最终，这项工作将通过提高公众对这类灾害带来的风险的认识，并增强开发有弹性的基础设施系统的工具，从而使社区更安全。计算能力的提高促进了海啸结构相互作用建模的新型数值方法的发展，这些方法旨在以高水平的分辨率和精度捕获特定的物理现象，包括模拟复杂系统相互作用的耦合多物理场模型。如果要实现针对社区的结构性脆弱性评估，就必须基于对这些相互作用的基本理解，以及在考虑这些事件不确定性的概率框架中有效模拟相关物理过程的能力。本研究项目的主要目标是建立一个开源的建模框架，其中3D计算流体动力学解算器可以有效地用于现有的、广泛使用的淹没模型的载荷预测能力的开发，并开发一个概率框架，用于预测社区一级海岸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该框架，评估水深测量和社区布局对流量的影响，完善模型以包括力预测，并扩展概率海啸危害评估方法以包括流体加载标准。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，通过提高我们对海啸事件对这些结构构成的概率风险的理解，提高海岸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.