Characteristic of tsunami force acting on shelter with mooring

Abstract

Tsunami shelter has been designed and built as a refuges in case tsunami occurs. In recent year, different kinds of tsunami shelter have been proposed and developed, which is either a building type or a floating one. The main purpose of this research is to propose a new type of tsunami shelter with elastic mooring in comparison with a fixed type of shelter and to investigate tsunami force acting on the shelter and motions due to tsunami wave. Three different kinds of tsunami shelter were compared, rectangular, trapezoid and streamline type, with two conditions such as fixed on the ground and floating with elastic mooring. To compute interaction between run-up tsunami wave and the tsunami shelters with mooring, the numerical model has been developed by using particle based method, Smooth Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) coupling with Extended Discrete Element Method (EDEM) for elastic mooring. Based on the validation of tsunami force and shelter motions with experimental results, the numerical results indicated that the model can simulate interactions between tsunami wave and shelter in fixed and mooring case. The result also shows that the tsunami force on the fixed tsunami shelter can be higher than that on the tsunami shelter with elastic mooring and then the mooring system can reduce tsunami force, 35% for averaged value and 50% for maximum one and the surge and pitch motions can be also reduced. The tsunami shelter with elastic mooring system could be a useful option for evacuating from tsunami attacking.