Estimation of Ability of a Numerical Simulation Method Coupling Groundwater with Atmosphere and Surface Water for Reproduce of Overtopping an Embankment

Abstract

Recently, many embankments have often collapsed by overtopping an embankment because of heavy rain fall in natural disaster. Variation in water saturation in the embankment influences the collapse of the embankment in the precipitation. Then Hibi and Tomigashi developed a numerical simulation method coupling groundwater with atmosphere and surface (ASGMF method). Purpose of this study is to confirm that ASGMF could reproduce infiltration into the embankment and overtopping the embankment by two-dimensional tank experiments and numerical simulations. As a result ASGMF could reproduce distribution of water saturation in the embankment obtained by the infiltration experiment and the overtopping experiment. On the other hand ASGMF was successfully able to reproduce raise of water level on a side of overflow in the overtopping experiment. However the raise of water level obtained by ASGMF was not almost consistent with that obtained by the infiltration experiment. As the whole this study concluded that ASGMF could almost reproduce the infiltration of water into the embankment when water in a river overflowed the embankment, but we should estimate the ability of ASGMF for the reproduce of the raise of water level in the storage pond by some experiments without a slope of the embankment in the future.