Numerical Modeling of Water Intrusion in Underground Spaces Throughout Stairs: Study Case of Paral·lel Metro Station in the City of Barcelona

In the past years, floods in metro stations occurred in different countries around the world with dramatic socioeconomic consequences. This study aims to contribute to the improvement of existing knowledge about the safety of metro users during this type of episodes. To achieve this, the objective of this research is to analyze the hydraulic conditions that occur in the Barcelona metro system, specifically, in one of the stair access of Paral·lel station, which, historically suffered flood problems and is representative of many other stations in the city. With this objective, a 1:1 scale physical model has been constructed at the hydraulic engineering lab of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) representing the mentioned stair. The study is complemented by the commercial 3D CFD numerical model Flow-3D software. This work will focus on the process of experimental measurements and the calibration and validation of the 3D numerical model based on the obtained physical data. The relevance of this complementation is based on the idea that the numerical model will ease the obtention of useful hydraulic parameters for hazard quantification such as velocity (V) and water depth (D) in every part of the domain and could provide scenarios that cannot be evaluated through the physical model (for instance, discharges beyond the maximum pumping capacity).