The water and environmental simulation of the effect of a dam failure on a real extent topography was in the past a very hard goal because of the too many cells needed for the calculation.
Since v11.0 of FLOW-3D® it is possible to use a hybrid approach, coupling a complete 3D simulation in the zone around the dam, where the splashing effects are more important, to a shallow water approach in the zone far away, having a solution to fast simulate such kind of situation. Moreover, since v11.1 of FLOW-3D®, it is possible to easily import raster file containing the topography with just one click, making the setup phase a matter of only some minutes.
In the simulation a real topography of a lake with mountains has been used, the extension of the computational domain is around 5’000 km2, and a hypothetical large Dam has been created inside the topography. Using all the physical models described before, and the general moving object to simulate the dam failure in a 3D accurate way, it was possible to predict the effect of the failure, the affected zone and the submerged zone in the topography.
The simulation lasts for more of 35 minutes of real time, simulating in a transient way the impact of the water on the topography up to the empty of the Dam. The resulting flow-rate across the broken dam is an interesting output of the simulation.
All the post processing makes use of lot of Flow-Sight new features: moving camera, different realistic coloration for topography and water, fine tuning of light transparencies and reflections to make the visualization more realistic as possible, the use of textures to represent the surface of the dam, moving camera to follow the fluid path, different plots and viewports to show in one only visualization all the critical aspect of the simulation.
Video 1 represent an overall view of the water flow with realistic colors. The video 2 instead is a more “scientific analysis”: the water is colored with the fluid depth, using a 20-colors color scale in order to highlight the depth difference also in small portion of the scale; the terrain is colored with the elevation. Finally, a plot of the flow rate across a baffle positioned in correspondence of the dam wall is also reported.
In the images a set of realistic rendering are saved, some of them with an evolution over time.
