A mechanical erosion model for two-phase mass flows

Abstract

Erosion, entrainment and deposition are complex and dominant, but yet poorly understood, mechanical processes in geophysical mass flows. Here, we propose a novel and process-based two-phase erosion-deposition model capable of adequately describing these complex phenomena commonly observed in landslides, avalanches, debris flows and bedload transports. The model is based on the jump in the momentum flux including changes of material and flow properties along the flow-bed interface and enhances an existing general two-phase mass flow model (“Pudasaini S.P., 2012, A general two-phase debris flow model, Journal of Geophysical Research, 117, F03010, doi:10.1029/2011JF002186”). A two-phase variably saturated erodible basal morphology is introduced which allows for the evolution of erosion-deposition-depths, incorporating the inherent physical process including momentum and rheological changes of the flowing mixture. By rigorous derivation, we show that appropriate incorporation of the mass and momentum productions or losses in conservative model formulation is essential for the physically correct and mathematically consistent description of erosion-entrainment-deposition processes. We show that mechanically deposition is the reversed process of erosion. We derive mechanically consistent closures for coefficients emerging in the erosion-rate models. We prove that effectively reduced friction in erosion is equivalent to the momentum production. With this, we solve the long standing dilemma of mass mobility, and show that erosion enhances the mass flow mobility. The novel enhanced real two-phase model reveals some major aspects of the mechanics associated with erosion, entrainment and deposition. The model appropriately captures the emergence and propagation of complex frontal surge dynamics associated with the frontal-drag with erosion.