Characterizing the dam break release

Abstract

The failure of a dam can cause disastrous consequences, thus understanding the nature of a dam break is of utmost importance. A model of a dam break was built and used to profile the resulting wave. The gate release was characterized to check for consistency, maximum velocity, and it's profile. Matlab code was created to analyze both the gate speed and the wave velocity. The maximum velocity was 1503.2 cm/s and there a 30% deviation at most.The wave velocity was found to increase as the water reservoir height was increased. An equation was derived that had a 0.96 correlation coefficient thus proving that the relationship between velocity and reservoir height was accurate. Further research can be done using a cantilevered plate downstream of the dam break to analyze the forces generated.