Call for Master student

Master project: Reliability analysis of sea-dikes in Shanghai city, China

Project description:
The unique climatic and geographic features of Shanghai result in its vulnerability to flooding. Its huge and rapidly developing economic scale and high population density could lead to tremendous consequences given flooding. As a result, flood risk in Shanghai, and specifically the reliability of its flood defence system, has drawn great attention from researchers, engineers as well as the authorities in recent years. Therefore, it is highly required the advanced reliability analysis which takes the local factors of defences into account to calculate the failure probability of the flood defence system including the  sea dikes.  The objective of this project is to develop fragility curves for typical cross sections of sea dikes in Shanghai in terms of overtopping, revetment failure and breaching.

The research questions are shown as below:

1. How to determine the probability of loads (i.e. water level  and waves) along the coastal area of Shanghai?
2. What failure mechanisms plays important roles for the sea dikes in Shanghai? (e.g. overtopping, revetment failure)
3. How to estimate/calculate the failure probabilities for typical cross sections of sea dikes?
4. What variables are influential in the limit state functions for overtopping and breaching?
5. Optional: what are the consequences of sea dike failure around Shanghai

Requirement:
We’re looking for a student who has interest in matlab coding and has already attended the courses of CIE5314 flood defences and bed bank and shore protection. Master of Chinese language is a plus.