All Climate Events

Wednesday, November 6, 2019. 5:00PM. Effects of Building Arrangement on Flow and Pressure Fields Generated by Waves Interacting with Beachfront Buildings. Ali Farhadzadeh, Stony Brook University. Sponsored by Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. More information here. 

Abstract: Despite all efforts in enhancing resiliency, our near-coast cities and communities still suffer from damages by coastal flooding. To reduce the impacts of flooding on communities, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has been implemented by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for many years. NFIP requires that buildings in high hazard areas subject to surge and wave actions, Zones VE and AE, to be elevated above the Base Flood Elevation (BFE). Many buildings in flood zones, however, were built before their communities entered the NFIP and/or are not in compliance with the requirement. Furthermore, rising sea levels and a changing climate have been pushing shorelines landward, placing more coastal communities that once considered to be in safe zones in flood-prone areas. Post flooding field surveys highlighted the importance of a structure’s elevation as well as position within a group of structures, on its survival chance during an extreme flooding event. I will present the results of our recent study on the effects of array configuration on flow and pressure fields generated by a solitary wave interacting with arrays of beachfront buildings. The study, which was conducted at Coastal and Hydraulic Engineering Research Laboratory (CHERL) at Stony Brook University, included a series of flume experiments and numerical simulations. The results highlight the spatial and temporal variations in the characteristics of flows through arrays of different configurations, as well as in the flood loading on the buildings based on their positions within an array.