Climate change is bringing more extreme weather to the southern Lake Michigan region along with dramatically variable water levels. With the risk of flooding increasing, so are potential threats to infrastructure, to residents, and to coastal communities as a whole.
An Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant faculty scholar is using computer modeling to help communities protect critical infrastructure in the face of increased flooding risks. Chengcheng Tao, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University, has developed an approach that incorporates risk assessment factors along with fluid-structure interaction simulations.
Fluid-structure interactions are what happens when a structure is impacted by a fluid force, like air meeting up with an airplane or, in this case, waves pounding on bridge supports. Risk assessment factors regarding infrastructure include scores for how vulnerable these structures are and how critical they are to the community and its residents.
The IISG scholars funding has helped Tao develop and test these model components on common bridge structures.
“Although I use the bridge infrastructure as an example in the study, the model can be applied to other infrastructure, like buildings or highways,” said Tao, who also is the director of Purdue’s Sustainable Infrastructure and ManUfacturing Lab
Thus far, she has been using publicly available data, but with access to a treasure trove of historical data to inform the model components, results will be more finely tuned. Purdue graduate student Junyi Duan, who is a key contributor to this project and is funded through the IISG Scholars program as well, has collected historical records from government organizations that reveal how floods have impacted locations in the Great Lakes region.
After combining the risk model with historical data and the physical model data, Tao will have a very comprehensive, data-rich framework. With that, she plans on building a smart infrastructure warning system.
“In the future, when a flood system is headed to a location, a smart warning system can predict the flood risk beforehand, before the damage happens,” said Tao. “The warning system may recommend that a community pay more attention to particular sites or infrastructure components.”
Ultimately, she wants to create a smart platform that residents can use on their cell phones or computers that show their particular flood risk scores.
A smart infrastructure warning system can help even earlier in the process. For example, insights from the modeling can help inform future infrastructure designs and even local design codes.
In addition to connecting with local organizations and presenting their work at three American Society of Civil Engineers conferences, Tao and her students joined with Purdue Science K-12 Outreach to film educational videos about flood hazards that will be posted on YouTube as part of Purdue’s Superheroes of Science series.
