A hypoplastic constitutive model for debris materials

Abstract

Debris flow is a very common and destructive natural hazard in mountainous regions. Pore water pressure is the major triggering factor in the initiation of debris flow. Excessive pore water pressure is also observed during the runout and deposition of debris flow. Debris materials are normally treated as solid particle–viscous fluid mixture in the constitutive modeling. A suitable constitutive model which can capture the solid-like and fluid-like behavior of solid–fluid mixture should have the capability to describe the developing of pore water pressure (or effective stresses) in the initiation stage and determine the residual effective stresses exactly. In this paper, a constitutive model of debris materials is developed based on a framework where a static portion for the frictional behavior and a dynamic portion for the viscous behavior are combined. The frictional behavior is described by a hypoplastic model with critical state for granular materials. The model performance is demonstrated by simulating undrained simple shear tests of saturated sand, which are particularly relevant for the initiation of debris flows. The partial and full liquefaction of saturated granular material under undrained condition is reproduced by the hypoplastic model. The viscous behavior is described by the tensor form of a modified Bagnold’s theory for solid–fluid suspension, in which the drag force of the interstitial fluid and the particle collisions are considered. The complete model by combining the static and dynamic parts is used to simulate two annular shear tests. The predicted residual strength in the quasi-static stage combined with the stresses in the flowing stage agrees well with the experimental data. The non-quadratic dependence between the stresses and the shear rate in the slow shear stage for the relatively dense specimens is captured.