2D numerical simulation of urban dam break and its effect to building using lax scheme with numerical filter

Abstract

Dam-break is one of the disasters that can occurred due to earthquake. The earthquake vibration may damage the dam construction and therefore causing a dam-break flow. The flow can cause severe destruction to the downstream urban area. Dam-break modeling offers a way to analyze its effect of buildings. In this study, a 2D model for analyzing dam break flow is developed based on the Saint Venant equations and solved using Lax Scheme. The initial condition of the modelling is a rectangular channel with obstacles at both sides of the channel and two similar columns in the middle of the channel. These obstacles are considered as buildings in an urban area. Numerical filter is used to increase the stability of the simulation. The developed model is able to perform well in simulating a case of urban dam-break based on a previous experiment. In addition, the applied numerical filter is able to handle shock, therefore maintaining the stability of the model while reducing the simulation time without the needs to use a higher order numerical scheme.