Simulate flooding and river flow for transportation projects

Autodesk Support

Jul 25, 2018


What

Climate change is radically changing the living conditions of people everywhere. Warm weather, droughts, and storms are increasingly frequent, with an intensity that challenges existing infrastructures. A river can turn from an important resource to a devastating hazard. Flooding patterns are changing.

Who

Hydraulic engineers, Engineering service providers, Designers, Project engineers, Planners.

How

The Autodesk portfolio provides two tools:

  1. InfraWorks and RiverFlow2D for Preliminary flood simulation.
  2. Autodesk River and Flow Analysis Module (RFA) for advanced river modeling that supports HEC-RAS in Autodesk Civil 3D.

RFA makes it easy to compute water surface profiles for modeling bridges, culverts, spillways, levees, bridge scour, floodway delineation, floodplain reclamation, stream diversions, stream restorations, stream realignments, and split flows.

RFA offers three main areas:

  • Navigation, and creating and editing geometry
  • Analysis
  • Output

According to the target, you can use RFA with different workflows. But for every infrastructure project, it’s necessary to understand the existing conditions. For example, for a new riverbed rehab project, you can consider these two main blocks:

With Autodesk Civil 3D, it’s easy to build and manage a DTM model and new rehab assembly.
Together, RFA and Civil 3D offer a one dynamic workflow that covers the editing, design, verification, and export phases.

This video shows some aspects of river flow analysis.

Why

Every clash produces delays and rework that increases construction costs.

What next

BIM design includes interoperability and collaboration among different disciplines. Two main new workflows can be improved using RFA and Civil 3D data:

  • Exportation to HEC-RAS.
  • Exportation to GIS.


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