An eulerian model for soil dynamics: application to fast slope movements

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an eulerian approach that can be used to model the propagation phase of catastrophic landslides. In the case of material composed by a solid skeleton and pore fluids, two physical phenomena must be considered: i) the propagation and, ii) the consolidation and dissipation of pore pressures. The PDE's are integrated in depth and solved with the Finite Element Method using the Taylor-Galerkin algorithm. It's possible to take into account the curvature effect of the bed of the slide using a curvilinear reference system or adding the contribution of the centrifuge force to the bottom friction force. A simple frictional fluid flow example shows the influence of the curvature effect. Role of pore pressure dissipation is analyzed modelling the Aberfan flowslide (1966).

KEYWORDS:

• fast landslides propagation
• pore pressure dissipation
• depth integrated model
• curvature effect
• FEM
• Taylor-Galerkin algorithm