Challenges and perspectives in designing engineering structures against debris-flow disaster

Abstract

Debris-flow disaster has caused large casualties and tremendous economic loss. Check dams, flexible barriers, silt dams and baffle arrays are most used disaster prevention countermeasures. For a better design strategy, we made a thorough review and discussion about the achievements and challenges in four important aspects, including impact force estimation, run-up height prediction, failure analysis and plain configuration planning. The impact force exerted by debris flow on structures is the most crucial design parameter, while most widely used models are based on hydraulic theory and lack physical mechanisms, especially in accounting for the effect of nonstationary flow regimes, impact patterns and barrier characteristics. Current methods of designing protection structures mainly depend on static and deterministic theory to address dynamic problems that are highly stochastic, which reveals a great research gap in understanding the response and failure under impact of structures. In future, physically based design strategy should be highlighted, for which robust physical modelling methods and numerical simulation tools are needed for the better understanding of flow–structure interaction mechanism and the verification of structure design strategy. Furthermore, the resilience-based disaster prevention concept should be highlighted for its outstanding ability in preparedness, response, and recovery when threatened by unknown disasters.

Keywords:

• Debris flow
• engineering structure design
• flow–structure interaction
• physical mechanism
• modelling
• resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41831291).