The details of a multi-hazard and probabilistic risk assessment, developed for urban planning and emergency response activities in Manizales, Colombia, are presented in this article. This risk assessment effort was developed under the framework of an integral disaster risk management project whose goal was to connect risk reduction activities by using open access and state-of-theart risk models. A probabilistic approach was used for the analysis of seismic, landslide, and volcanic hazards to obtain stochastic event sets suitable for probabilistic loss estimation and to generate risk results in different metrics after aggregating in a rigorous way the losses associated to the different hazards. Detailed and high resolution exposure databases were used for the building stock and infrastructure of the city together with a set of vulnerability functions for each of the perils considered. The urban and territorial ordering plan of the city was updated for socioeconomic development and land use using the hazard and risk inputs and determinants, which cover not only the current urban area but also those adjacent areas where the expansion of Manizales is expected to occur. The emergency response capabilities of the city were improved by taking into account risk scenarios and after updating an automatic and real-time post-earthquake damage assessment.
Increasing interest in thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) studies of soil responses to hydrological variations has heightened the need for improvements in the basic understanding of the heat and mass transport taking place at the soil-atmosphere interface. Numerous hydrological parameters affect this thermo-hydro-mechanical process including solar radiation, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind velocity, rain intensity and hygrometry. Since field tests of soil-atmosphere interaction require measurements over long periods of time, only a small number of these results are available for calibration of the numerical models that are based on atmospheric data as boundary condition. The number is even more limited for results which focus on cyclic wetting and drying. Centrifuge modeling is a powerful tool for studying these problems since it can accelerate the time needed for diffusion processes taking place at the soil-atmosphere interface. Nevertheless, modeling this interaction adequately with a centrifuge requires development of new types of equipment such as a climatic chamber that allows control of weather variables while respecting the centrifuge’s scaling laws. This paper describes the design of an apparatus for simulating tropical weather conditions which combines a climatic chamber with a centrifuge. The scaling laws are studied, and the feasibility of reproducing tropical weather conditions around a centrifuge is discussed. Finally, the paper presents some validation results that highlight the working principles of this new apparatus.
Rainfall simulation in centrifuge models is important for modelling soil-atmosphere interactions. However, the presence of Coriolis force, drag forces, evaporation and wind within the centrifuge may affect the distribution of rainfall over the model. As a result, development of appropriate centrifuge rain simulators requires a demanding process of experimental trial and error. This paper highlights the key factors involved in controlling rainfall in centrifuge simulations, develops a mathematical model to simulate rainfall within a centrifuge and shows how to calibrate it experimentally. Finally, the paper summarises some important factors that should be considered in the development of rainfall simulators for centrifuges.
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