Numerical Simulations of Slope and Levee Failure under Heavy Rainfall Using the Three-phase SPH Model

Abstract

The failure of slope and levee triggered by heavy rainfall is a great threat to people's lives and properties, thus this research aimed at proposing a new numerical simulation tool and investigating the failure mechanism of slope and levee under heavy rainfall. The new Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) model with the coupling of three phases, water, soil and air, has been proposed based on the basic principles. Using the proposed SPH program, the rising and burst of air bubble in water was simulated to validate the application in fluid phase (water and air). After that, a conceptual slope model with different coefficients of permeability has been built and analyzed by the SPH model. The simulated infiltration showed that the proposed SPH model can simulate the interaction force between soil and water well. The model test of slope failure conducted before was simulated by the proposed SPH model with two cases, one without the effect of air phase and another one with the effect of air phase. The infiltration process, slope deformation and air behavior were revealed from the three-phase SPH simulations and the results proved that the proposed SPH model could be a useful tool to evaluate the stability of slope and levee under heavy rainfall.

Application of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) for simulating various geotechnical problems

“…Considering its capability for handling boundary particles, Lagrangian nature and simple formulation has attracted researchers in different branches of engineering to use it in fields such as fluid dynamics, viscous flow, wave over-topping and dam-break flooding [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Furthermore, its application has been extended to simulating landslide dynamics, slope failures, fluid-solid interactions and associated problems [5,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] and, in the preceding cases which involve large deformations, it performs quite well for replicating real instances [33][34][35][36]. Therefore, given all SPH's positive attributes, its extension to simulating traditional geotechnical engineering problems is a breakthrough in numerical modeling.…”