Abstract
A rock fall occurs when a fragment of rock is detached from a cliff and travels down-slope at high speed. Rock falls are a constant hazard in mountainous regions and pose a significant threat to the population. In this paper, a comparison of software designed to model rock falls is presented. The computer codes selected for the experiment are STONE and RocFall®. STONE is a research code for the 3-dimensional simulation of rock falls. RocFall® is commercial software widely used for the 2-dimensional simulation of rock falls along user defined topographic profiles. The two computer programs require similar input and provide comparable outputs, allowing for a quantitative evaluation of their modelling results. To compare the software, the Monte Salta rock fall, in northern Italy, was selected. Specific tests were designed to compare the ability of the software to predict the maximum travel distance of the falling boulders, and the distance from the ground of the computed rock fall trajectories. Results indicate that the two rock fall modelling codes provide similar--but not identical--results. In general, STONE computes higher and longer rock fall trajectories than RocFall®, and allows identifying a larger area as potentially affected by falling boulders.
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