"Water is Life" is a statement mentioned or implied in many holy books to emphasis the importance of water as a source of life for all living things. Dams are civil engineering structures designed to use this water more beneficially in flood control, irrigation, water supply, hydropower etc. However, catastrophic flooding is likely to occur if a dam fails and this may cause extensive property damage and a large loss of human life. Concern over dam failures has therefore increased recently within university research, governmental agencies and commercial marketplace.
One of the objectives of this study is to make a comparison between two different modelling packages. One has been specifically developed for dam break problems (DAMBRK UK) and the other is a general-purpose package for modelling flows in rivers (ISIS FLOW). The aim is to ensure that the latter can perform dam break analysis with sufficient accuracy and reliability since it has a more user- friendly environment than the first package. This objective has been achieved by modelling two different case studies using each of the modelling packages. The results of the case studies showed a similar behaviour of both packages in dealing with relatively mild slopes. With a relatively steep slope, results showed different performance between modelling packages. Other dam break modelling packages has been used (e.g. FLDWAV) to find out which performance is acceptable. Results from these modelling packages showed that ISIS performance was better than DAMBRK UK.
To pursue an effective flood management strategy it is highly beneficial to integrate both dam break modelling packages and Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies. The success of using GIS for flood management is reliant upon the development of a link between GIS and dam break numerical modelling packages. The second main objective of this research was to develop such a tool that can link GIS and dam break packages. A tool called ISIS GIS has been developed using DELPHI programming language and ArcView's programming language to link ISIS FLOW with the desktop GIS package ArcView. The new tool can extract cross sections from ground elevation model and export them to be used by ISIS, calculate the distance between cross sections, and map the flood levels and flood damage risk.
To enhance the capabilities of ISIS FLOW in dealing with dam break problem, a graphical user interface for the established BREACH modelling package has been developed and incorporated into ISIS's environment. BREACH can model the breaching of an earth embankment dam from either an overtopping or piping failure. The program predicts the breach characteristics such as size, shape, and time of formation, and the breach outflow hydrograph. Using the developed user interface, the user can easily create an input file for BREACH, run the model, plot the outflow hydrograph, export the results to be used by different dam break and flow packages and view the output file.
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