Investigation of building infrastructure modeling for the hydraulic simulation of flooding in an urban catchment

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the effect of building the effect of building infrastructure on the hydraulic flood simula on in the urban catchment of the Podoni i River, using HEC – RAS and QGIS soware. The methodology includes the applica on of two modeling methods: the Stubby Building method to simulate the height of buildings and their effect on flow, and the Building Resistance method to esmate the resistance of buildings as physical barriers. Ini ally, the Digital Terrain Method (DEM) was imported into QGIS, where 19.800 polygons represen ng individual or groups of buildings were created. Subsequently, the DEM was elevated by 5m and 12m to examine the effect of different building heights on the hydrological simula ons. The DEM is imported to create a topographic model within HEC – RAS. The methodology includes eleven experiments with parameters such as grid cell size, Manning’s value, Curve Number (CN), return periods (T=100 and T1000) and the addi on of different building heights. The comparison of the experiments focuses on the esma on of the discharge and flood zones in combina on with the presence of buildings structures, and the comparison of the two methods. The results showed that the grid size affects the accuracy of the simula ons, while the different methods affect the flow and the flood distribution. Despite these findings, the study’s limitations include the lack of local validation data and the use of a uniform grid across the catchment area.