scholarly journals A New Dam-Break Outflow-Rate Concept and Its Installation to a Hydro-Morphodynamics Simulation Model Based on FDM (An Example on Amagase Dam of Japan)

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 1759
Author(s):  
Sayed Masihullah Ahmadi ◽  
Yoshimichi Yamamoto

Dams are constructed to benefit humans; however, dam-break disasters are unpredictable and inevitable leading to economic and human life losses. The sequential catastrophe of a dam break directly depends on its outflow hydrograph and the extent of population centers that are located downstream of an affected dam. The population density of the cities located in the vicinity of dams has increased in recent times and since a dam break hydrograph relies on many uncertainties and complexities in devising a dam-break outflow hydrograph, more researches for the accurate estimation of a dam-break flood propagation, extent and topography change becomes valuable; therefore, in this paper, the authors propose a novel and simplified dam-break outflow rate equation that is applicable for sudden-partial dam breaks. The proposed equation is extensively affected by a dam-break shape. Therefore, the inference of a dam-break shape on a dam-break outflow rate is investigated in the current study by executing hydraulic experiments in a long, dry bed, frictionless and rectangular water channel connected to a finite water tank to acquire a mean break-shape factor. The proposed equation is further validated by regenerating the Malpasset dam-break hydrograph and comparing it to the existing methods and also by installing it on an existing 2D hydro-morphodynamics flood simulation model. Finally, Amagase Dam’s (arch-reaction dam in Japan) break simulation is executed as a case study. The results of the simulations revealed that the greater the height of a dam-break section, the more devastating its flood consequences would be.

Author(s):  
J. O. Jeje

This research centres on the study of the filtration and backwashing operations of the filtration unit of the Opa Waterworks and a detailed laboratory study of the filtration and backwashing characteristics of the filter medium being used at the treatment plant. A detailed study of the filtration unit of Opa Waterworks was undertaken with particular emphasis placed on the estimation of the volume of water used during backwashing, the backwashing procedure and the average backwashing time. Specific properties of the filter medium used in the gravity filter such as porosity, density, equivalent density, specific gravity and unhindered settling velocity were investigated in the laboratory. The backwashing properties of the filter medium was also studied using the DSF (Dynamic Shape Factor) and Sphericity models and the predicted results obtained were compared to the actual laboratory results. Based on works carried out, the volume of wash-water required for the gravity filters was estimated as 14,200 litres (14.2 m3) which is about 3.12% of the total volume of the clear water tank, with an outflow rate of 0.01 m3/s. The accuracy of the Blake – Kozeny equation in predicting head loss across a filter bed using clean water runs was investigated and found to be reasonably accurate, and the prediction errors


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Karagiannakis

This paper deals with state of the art risk and resilience calculations for industrial plants. Resilience is a top priority issue on the agenda of societies due to climate change and the all-time demand for human life safety and financial robustness. Industrial plants are highly complex systems containing a considerable number of equipment such as steel storage tanks, pipe rack-piping systems, and other installations. Loss Of Containment (LOC) scenarios triggered by past earthquakes due to failure on critical components were followed by severe repercussions on the community, long recovery times and great economic losses. Hence, facility planners and emergency managers should be aware of possible seismic damages and should have already established recovery plans to maximize the resilience and minimize the losses. Seismic risk assessment is the first step of resilience calculations, as it establishes possible damage scenarios. In order to have an accurate risk analysis, the plant equipment vulnerability must be assessed; this is made feasible either from fragility databases in the literature that refer to customized equipment or through numerical calculations. Two different approaches to fragility assessment will be discussed in this paper: (i) code-based Fragility Curves (FCs); and (ii) fragility curves based on numerical models. A carbon black process plant is used as a case study in order to display the influence of various fragility curve realizations taking their effects on risk and resilience calculations into account. Additionally, a new way of representing the total resilience of industrial installations is proposed. More precisely, all possible scenarios will be endowed with their weighted recovery curves (according to their probability of occurrence) and summed together. The result is a concise graph that can help stakeholders to identify critical plant equipment and make decisions on seismic mitigation strategies for plant safety and efficiency. Finally, possible mitigation strategies, like structural health monitoring and metamaterial-based seismic shields are addressed, in order to show how future developments may enhance plant resilience. The work presented hereafter represents a highly condensed application of the research done during the XP-RESILIENCE project, while more detailed information is available on the project website https://r.unitn.it/en/dicam/xp-resilience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6478
Author(s):  
Amemarlita Matos ◽  
Laura Barraza ◽  
Isabel Ruiz-Mallén

This study is based on ethnographic research that analyzes how traditional knowledge and local beliefs on biodiversity conservation relates to the local ability to adapt and be resilient to climatic changes in two communities around Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique: Nhanfisse in the buffer zone and Muanandimae in the core area. A total of 78 semi-structured interviews with heads of households were conducted. We found that both communities carried out practices and held beliefs associated with conservation, such as protecting trees and animal species considered sacred or perceived as beneficial for human life in terms of water provision and agricultural production. In addition to traditional ceremonies that respond to extreme climatic events such as drought and flood, other adaptation strategies used by the communities include moving to neighboring areas in search of better living conditions and using forest products in times of scarcity. We discuss that the management of the park should be agreed on, in a shared way, between local communities and conservation agents to ensure that these areas continue to perform the ecological, subsistence, and spiritual functions required. Our research results contribute to a better understanding of local adaptation dynamics towards extreme climatic events and improvement of management strategies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 196
Author(s):  
Julio Manuel de Luis-Ruiz ◽  
Benito Ramiro Salas-Menocal ◽  
Gema Fernández-Maroto ◽  
Rubén Pérez-Álvarez ◽  
Raúl Pereda-García

The quality of human life is linked to the exploitation of mining resources. The Exploitability Index (EI) assesses the actual possibilities to enable a mine according to several factors. The environment is one of the most constraining ones, but its analysis is made in a shallow way. This research is focused on its determination, according to a new preliminary methodology that sets the main components of the environmental impact related to the development of an exploitation of industrial minerals and its weighting according to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It is applied to the case of the ophitic outcrops in Cantabria (Spain). Twelve components are proposed and weighted with the AHP and an algorithm that allows for assigning a normalized value for the environmental factor to each deposit. Geographic Information Systems (GISs) are applied, allowing us to map a large number of components of the environmental factors. This provides a much more accurate estimation of the environmental factor, with respect to reality, and improves the traditional methodology in a substantial way. It can be established as a methodology for mining spaces planning, but it is suitable for other contexts, and it raises developing the environmental analysis before selecting the outcrop to be exploited.


Author(s):  
Masakazu Hashimoto ◽  
Kenji Kawaike ◽  
Tomonori Deguchi ◽  
Shammi Haque ◽  
Arpan Paul ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Aleksandar Tomic ◽  
Shahani Kariyawasam

A lethality zone due to an ignited natural gas release is often used to characterize the consequences of a pipeline rupture. A 1% lethality zone defines a zone where the lethality to a human is greater than or equal to 1%. The boundary of the zone is defined by the distance (from the point of rupture) at which the probability of lethality is 1%. Currently in the gas pipeline industry, the most detailed and validated method for calculating this zone is embodied in the PIPESAFE software. PIPESAFE is a software tool developed by a joint industry group for undertaking quantitative risk assessments of natural gas pipelines. PIPESAFE consequence models have been verified in laboratory experiments, full scale tests, and actual failures, and have been extensively used over the past 10–15 years for quantitative risk calculations. The primary advantage of using PIPESAFE is it allows for accurate estimation of the likelihood of lethality inside the impacted zone (i.e. receptors such as structures closer to the failure are subject to appropriately higher lethality percentages). Potential Impact Radius (PIR) is defined as the zone in which the extent of property damage and serious or fatal injury would be expected to be significant. It corresponds to the 1% lethality zone for a natural gas pipeline of a certain diameter and pressure when thermal radiation and exposure are taken into account. PIR is one of the two methods used to identify HCAs in US (49 CFR 192.903). Since PIR is a widely used parameter and given that it can be interpreted to delineate a 1% lethality zone, it is important to understand how PIR compares to the more accurate estimation of the lethality zones for different diameters and operating pressures. In previous internal studies, it was found that PIR, when compared to the more detailed measures of the 1% lethality zone, could be highly conservative. This conservatism could be beneficial from a safety perspective, however it is adding additional costs and reducing the efficiency of the integrity management process. Therefore, the goal of this study is to determine when PIR is overly conservative and to determine a way to address this conservatism. In order to assess its accuracy, PIR was compared to a more accurate measure of the 1% lethality zone, calculated by PIPESAFE, for a range of different operating pressures and line diameters. Upon comparison of the distances calculated through the application of PIR and PIPESAFE, it was observed that for large diameters pipelines the distances calculated by PIR are slightly conservative, and that this conservativeness increases exponentially for smaller diameter lines. The explanation for the conservatism of the PIR for small diameter pipelines is the higher wall friction forces per volume transported in smaller diameter lines. When these higher friction forces are not accounted for it leads to overestimation of the effective outflow rate (a product of the initial flow rate and the decay factor) which subsequently leads to the overestimation of the impact radius. Since the effective outflow rate is a function of both line pressure and diameter, a simple relationship is proposed to make the decay factor a function of these two variables to correct the excess conservatism for small diameter pipelines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3487
Author(s):  
Helge Nordal ◽  
Idriss El-Thalji

The introduction of Industry 4.0 is expected to revolutionize current maintenance practices by reaching new levels of predictive (detection, diagnosis, and prognosis processes) and prescriptive maintenance analytics. In general, the new maintenance paradigms (predictive and prescriptive) are often difficult to justify because of their multiple inherent trade-offs and hidden systems causalities. The prediction models, in the literature, can be considered as a “black box” that is missing the links between input data, analysis, and final predictions, which makes the industrial adaptability to such models almost impossible. It is also missing enable modeling deterioration based on loading, or considering technical specifications related to detection, diagnosis, and prognosis, which are all decisive for intelligent maintenance purposes. The purpose and scientific contribution of this paper is to present a novel simulation model that enables estimating the lifetime benefits of an industrial asset when an intelligent maintenance management system is utilized as mixed maintenance strategies and the predictive maintenance (PdM) is leveraged into opportunistic intervals. The multi-method simulation modeling approach combining agent-based modeling with system dynamics is applied with a purposefully selected case study to conceptualize and validate the simulation model. Three maintenance strategies (preventive, corrective, and intelligent) and five different scenarios (case study data, manipulated case study data, offshore and onshore reliability data handbook (OREDA) database, physics-based data, and hybrid) are modeled and simulated for a time period of 20 years (175,200 h). Intelligent maintenance is defined as PdM leveraged in opportunistic maintenance intervals. The results clearly demonstrate the possible lifetime benefits of implementing an intelligent maintenance system into the case study as it enhanced the operational availability by 0.268% and reduced corrective maintenance workload by 459 h or 11%. The multi-method simulation model leverages and shows the effect of the physics-based data (deterioration curves), loading profiles, and detection and prediction levels. It is concluded that implementing intelligent maintenance without an effective predictive horizon of the associated PdM and effective frequency of opportunistic maintenance intervals, does not guarantee the gain of its lifetime benefits. Moreover, the case study maintenance data shall be collected in a complete (no missing data) and more accurate manner (use hours instead of date only) and used to continuously upgrade the failure rates and maintenance times.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Ibrahim Mohamed ◽  
Ahmed Mahmoud El-Menoufi ◽  
Eman Abed Ezz El-Regal ◽  
Ahmed Mohamed Ali ◽  
Khaled Mohamed Mansour ◽  
...  

Abstract Field development planning of gas condensate fields using numerical simulation has many aspects to consider that may lead to a significant impact on production optimization. An important aspect is to account for the effects of network constraints and process plant operating conditions through an integrated asset model. This model should honor proper representation of the fluid within the reservoir, through the wells and up to the network and facility. Obaiyed is one of the biggest onshore gas field in Egypt, it is a highly heterogeneous gas condensate field located in the western desert of Egypt with more than 100 wells. Three initial condensate gas ratios are existing based on early PVT samples and production testing. The initial CGRs as follows;160, 115 and 42 STB/MMSCF. With continuous pressure depletion, the produced hydrocarbon composition stream changes, causing a deviation between the design parameters and the operating parameters of the equipment within the process plant, resulting in a decrease in the recovery of liquid condensate. Therefore, the facility engineers demand a dynamic update of a detailed composition stream to optimize the system and achieve greater economic value. The best way to obtain this compositional stream is by using a fully compositional integrated asset model. Utilizing a fully compositional model in Obaiyed is challenging, computationally expensive, and impractical, especially during the history match of the reservoir numerical model. In this paper, a case study for Obaiyed field is presented in which we used an alternative integrated asset modeling approach comprising a modified black-oil (MBO) that results in significant timesaving in the full-field reservoir simulation model. We then used a proper de-lumping scheme to convert the modified black oil tables into as many components as required by the surface network and process plant facility. The results of proposed approach are compared with a fully compositional approach for validity check. The results clearly identified the system bottlenecks. The model can be used to propose the best tie-in location of future wells in addition to providing first-pass flow assurance indications throughout the field's life and under different network configurations. The model enabled the facility engineers to keep the conditions of the surface facility within the optimized operating envelope throughout the field's lifetime.


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