Abstract

The soil erosion of the spoil tips seriously threatens the safety of people's lives and property and the surrounding ecological environment. Rill erosion is an important cause of water and soil loss in spoil tips. This study was conducted to investigate the process of rill erosion on the slopes of spoil tips, changes in the morphological characteristics of rills and the mechanisms of rill erosion. A Field runoff plot (5 m long, 1 m wide and 0.5 m deep) with three inflow rates (1.6, 2 and 2.4 mm min−1) and three typical slopes (28°, 32° and 36°) was used for runoff simulation experiments. The results showed that, compared with the slope and scouring times, inflow rate was the most important factor affecting rill erosion of the spoil tips. The development of rill mainly goes through three stages: the rill formation stage, the rill development stage and the rill adjustment stage. The overall predominance of parallel-shaped rills at all experiments suggested that the formation of rills was dominated by concentrated runoff. The average rill depth was the best indicator of rill morphology for evaluating rill erosion. The flow regimes under the experimental conditions were supercritical-laminar flow and supercritical-transition flow. The Reynolds number was the best hydraulic parameter for predicting rill erosion. The stream power was the best hydrodynamic parameter to describe rill erosion mechanism. These results contributed to further revealing the rill erosion mechanism on the slope of the spoil tips and provided a scientific basis for its soil erosion control.

Highlights

  • Transportation, water conservancy, mining and other infrastructure construction industries are developing rapidly globally, especially in China

  • Fluctuations in runoff rates are mainly related to the development of rills and are relatively greater with increasing slope and inflow rate(Jiang et al, 2018)

  • According to Eq (8) and (9), the importance of slope (S), inflow rate(I) and scouring times (N) on runoff rate and soil loss rate are in the following order: I >S >N

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Summary

Introduction

Transportation, water conservancy, mining and other infrastructure construction industries are developing rapidly globally, especially in China. Compared with the undisturbed landscape, the typical characteristics of spoil tips include loose structure without vegetation-covered, slope with steep gradients and short length(Zhang et al, 2015; Lv et al, 2019). Its soil erosion rate and erosion intensity far exceed those of the original landform(Mcclintock and Harbor 2013), causing significantly greater soil loss than that of eroded landform units such as sloping land and forest land(Kaufman 2000). Previous studies showed that spoil tips have become a major source of soil erosion from production and construction projects(Peng et al, 2014). Under the effect of rainfall and runoff, spoil tips are prone to serious secondary hazards such as soil erosion(Guo et al, 2020), landslides and debris flows(Conforti and Ietto

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