Colorado State University Awarded $1.7 Million to Design Levee Overtopping Facility

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has hired a Colorado State University water researcher to design and build a levee testing facility capable of simulating erosion from the enormous waves that likely contributed to Hurricane Katrina’s devastating toll on New Orleans.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded $1.7 million to Chris Thornton, director of the Engineering Research Center, to design and build one of the world’s largest wave overtopping simulators at the university’s Foothills Campus in Fort Collins. The CSU team will be initially responsible for generating guidelines and methodologies for determining the forces exerted on levees during extreme storm conditions for all levee systems, not just the New Orleans area, said Thornton, also an assistant professor in the civil and environmental engineering department.

The project will consist of a specially designed tower and control mechanism, about 28 ft x 7 ft, operated by a computer system that will simulate waves larger than the roughly 6-ft waves that hit New Orleans. Water will be sent into 40 ft x 6 ft “trays” that will be able to be used to simulate levees made of soils specific to any region.

Researchers at the Army Corps of Engineers Coastal Engineering Laboratory at the Engineering Research and Development Center in Vicksburg. Miss., are building, populating and maintaining a set of trays simulating conditions consistent with those of the Gulf region. Once established, the initial sets of trays will be shipped to Fort Collins and tested during the spring and summer of 2010.

Levees, and their supporting infrastructure are susceptible to erosion and, as a result, potential catastrophic breach with intense hurricanes and the associated storm surge. Scientists and engineers generally agree that there is a real need for more information about how levees can be designed to resist wave overtopping and the potential for erosion.

And it’s not as simple as testing one levee in New Orleans, Thornton said. “It’s not going to be one-size-fits-all fix,” Thornton said. “While testing can be specific to a field location and account for unique soil and vegetation combinations, we need to develop design methodologies that allow us to use all the tools in our toolbox.

“A tremendous amount of work has been done across the academic, engineering and manufacturing communities to develop engineered systems that resist the force of flowing water. Our job will be to crack the nut of physics and develop a method permitting the effects from forces generated on levees during wave overtopping to be incorporated into current design methodologies. I expect the results of this program to spark innovation and advancement in the erosion control industry.”

Source: Colorado State University