Forces on surface-piercing vertical circular cylinder groups on flooding staircase

Abstract Flooding into underground spaces has become a common threat and caused significant damages and casualties in the past decades. To improve the understanding of people walking through the flooding staircase, a 1:2-scale physical model of a staircase with rest platform was assembled. An instrument was developed to measure the hydrodynamic forces acting on individual vertical circular cylinders, as well as cylinder groups arranged side-by-side, in tandem and staggered cylinder arrays on the flooding staircase. The results show that the horizontal hydrodynamic force on a cylinder increases rapidly with the increasing of the inundated depth on the entrance of the staircase. With a side-by-side tight cylinder array, the force on the central cylinder is always larger than an isolated one. The force on the downstream cylinder in tandem cylinder array is always smaller. However, the drag coefficients of both cases are much larger than the corresponding ones in a horizontal bed channel. For the case of staggered cylinder array, the force on the downstream cylinder varies with the change of the transverse spacing and the longitudinal distance between cylinders.