Two-phase SPH numerical study of pore-water pressure effect on debris flows mobility: Yu Tung debris flow

Abstract

A debris flow is one of the most dangerous types of geophysical mass flows moving downward mountain slopes and consist of a mixture of soil and rocks with a significant quantity of interstitial fluid. They can travel at extremely rapid velocities affecting long distances due to the significant influence of pore-water pressures on the propagation stage. In this paper, a novel two-phase depth-integrated SPH numerical model is applied to simulate a debris flow in which the effects of bed entrainment and pore-water pressure evolution, essential components to performed debris flows risk assessment, are included. The model was applied to simulate the dynamics of Yu Tung debris flow which is an appropriate benchmark case to examine the applicability of the developed model, as bed entrainment and pore-water pressure evolution were key aspects that affected the moving mass dynamics. The developed two-phase depth-integrated SPH-FD model is applied to assess the structural countermeasure of the bottom drainage screen, used to reduce the impact of debris flows. The reasonable results obtained from the analysis indicate that the model is capable to properly reproduce the propagation of the debris flow and more importantly to correctly perform the time-space evolution of pore water pressures during the whole deformation process from initiation through propagation, over an impermeable and permeable bottom boundary, up to deposition.