Several critical bridges were damaged severely because of wave surges during Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Damage to the built infrastructure during Hurricanes Irene in 2011 and Sandy in 2012 in the New York City Metropolitan area shows the potential risk to critical coastal bridges. This risk could be higher in the future hurricanes because of sea level rise and climate change effects. This project?s broader significance and importance are the development of a computational framework for the prediction of vulnerability of bridges to extreme storm surges during future hurricanes and the development of design guidelines for reducing these vulnerabilities. Successful application of outcome of this project will help improve the adaptability and resilience of bridge infrastructure with respect to extreme storm surges. Educational and outreach impacts of the project are opportunities for underrepresented and women students to participate in multidisciplinary research on mathematical and computer modeling of emerging problems and knowledge for engineers on effects of climate change on built infrastructure.
The objective of the proposed research is to investigate hydrodynamic impacts on bridges due to extreme storm surges during future hurricanes. The scope of this project includes computational modeling of storm surges including large-scale estuary flows and computational fluid dynamics simulation of impact of storm surge on bridges. Vulnerable bridges in the New York City harbor will be selected for demonstration because of the availability of storm surge data during Hurricane Sandy and complex coastlines and bathymetry. Reliability of the computational framework will be demonstrated through comparison with (i) storm surges observed during the Hurricane Sandy and (ii) storm surges simulated in small scale experiments using tsunami generator. The proposed research involves simulation of multi-scale and multi-physics processes related to the evolution of storm surge in the open sea at scales of 100 km and propagation of the surge to the coastal harbor and transfer of forces to bridge components at scales less than 1 m.
