A New Experimental Study and SPH Comparison for the Sequential Dam-Break Problem

The floods following the event of a dam collapse can have a significant impact on the downstream environment and ecology. Due to the limited number of real-case data for dam-break floods, laboratory experiments and numerical models are used to understand the complex flow behavior and to analyze the impact of the dam-break wave for different scenarios. In this study, a newly designed experimental campaign was conducted for the sequential dam-break problem in a rectangular channel with a steep slope, and the obtained results were compared against those of a particle-based numerical model. The laboratory tests permitted a better understanding of the physical process, highlighting five successive stages observed in the downstream reservoirs: dam-break wave propagation, overtopping, reflection wave, run-up, and oscillations. Experimental data were acquired using a virtual wave probe based on an image processing technique. A professional camera and a smartphone camera were used to obtain the footage of the experiment to examine the effect of the resolution and frame rate on image processing. The numerical results were obtained through the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method using free DualSPHysics software. The experimental and numerical results were in good agreement generally. Hence, the presented data can be used as a benchmark in future studies to validate the SPH and other Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods.