Interdisciplinary Workshop on ROCKFALL PROTECTION

ii Preface Compared to other landslide movements, rockfall is an extremely rapid process with long travel distances. When an event occurs, the ability of persons to take evasive actions is almost reduced to zero and the risk of injury or loss of life is high. Damages to buildings and infrastructures are likely as well. In many cases suitable protection measures are thus necessary. The workshop brings together international researchers and practitioners to discuss and evaluate existing and new findings, methods and results that are relevant for a proper protection against rockfall. Furthermore, the workshop aims to discuss and evaluate new visions and ideas for future rockfall research. It is therefore valuable for people involved in projects on rockfall protection of infrastructure, working in the fields of civil or environmental engineering, risk and safety, earth and natural sciences. When a risk analysis related to possible rockfall hazards reveals a threat to people, buildings or infrastructures, suitable structural protection measures have to be selected according to the expected event frequency and impact energies. For proper design and dimensioning of the measures, it is essential to know the magnitude of the impact loads and the performance of the structures, such as walls, fences, galleries or dams. This knowledge can be obtained from numerical simulations, experiments, models or existing guidelines. However, rockfall protection considerations do not only comprehend structural protection measures. At first it has to be clarified whether, why and where rocks are released and to which amount. The rockfall initiation depends also on different mostly not yet quantified factors such as weathering, frost and melting cycles or heavy rainfall. Subsequent trajectory analyses determine the areas that have to be protected by additional measures. To account for their high sensitiveness to only small changes in the landscape such as bedrock, dead wood, small dips etc, statistical analyses of rockfall danger are usually performed, at best including a plausibility analysis on the accuracy of the results. It is therefore the aim of the workshop to deal with the methods and measures that are used to protect from rockfall effectively and efficiently. The workshop will therefore focus on existing and new protection approaches that are evaluated and discussed regarding their performance, reliability, validation, extreme loads etc. Contributions to this topic cover different aspects such as rockfall danger, structural protection measures, tests, modeling and simulations. A stochastic framework for the modelling of the impact of a …