Drag coefficient for amphibious house

Abstract

Recently, flooding has become a serious issue and disaster in Malaysia. Therefore, it is crucial to search for a more effective flood mitigation approach in Malaysia. Amphibious house system is a new sustainable and flexible flood mitigation measure within a floating urbanization environment. Amphibious house has been designed based on buoyancy terminology by using precast and fast formulatable concrete components such as concrete pontoons. These pontoons are made of green lightweight concrete and analysed for buoyancy and stability against vertical and horizontal loads. This study aims to identify the precise force calculation from floods to amphibious houses as a new flood mitigation system. The objective of this study is to develop a new equation for calculating the drag coefficient for the amphibious house. A new experimental method is used to calculate drag force on the amphibious house in 1/25 scaled-down floodplain model. As a result, the new equation is developed for the drag coefficient. The sensitivity analysis shows the accuracy of this research.

Keywords:

• Flood modelling
• flow-structure interactions
• drag force

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Ministry of Higher Education – Malaysia (MOHE) and UTM Research Management Centre (RMC) for the funding and supporting this project under the VOT Q.J130000.7122.01H90 that helped to make this paper publishable. Moreover, special gratitude goes to UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MALAYSIA for supporting this study.