Investigation Into Overtopping Mitigation Strategies

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This agreement represents an opportunity for research into mitigation strategies for embankment and floodwall overtopping breach. To accomplish this, the following is anticipated: 1.     Assess factors that may lead to overtopping breach and relevant failure mechanisms for the different embankment and floodwall designs that are common to the USACE inventory. Assess the current state of practice for numerical modeling used for performance predictions of levees and floodwalls with regards to overtopping breach. Collect case histories of overtopping events for use in analytical or numerical assessment of embankment and floodwall performance when overtopping occurs. 2.     Identify the current state of practice for mitigating overtopping of flood control levees and floodwalls, including USACE and international approaches. Identify potential emerging technologies that could be used to mitigate overtopping breach of flood control embankments and floodwalls. 3.     Perform laboratory investigations to quantify potential improvement of embankment and floodwall foundation soils during overtopping. Saturated and unsaturated soil mechanics approaches could be explored when appropriate. 4.     Investigate and develop numerical methodologies to improve current numerical performance predictions. Identify advanced approaches and define when these might improve performance predictions. Identify uncertainty in standard and advanced numerical approaches. 5.     Perform physical testing to assess different mitigation strategies for overtopping performance of the different mitigation strategies. Provide quantifiable design recommendation based on these tests as well as data for the validation of numerical models.