Landslide dam failure and flood hydraulics. Part I: experimental investigation

Zhixian Cao (), Zhiyuan Yue and Gareth Pender

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2011, vol. 59, issue 2, 1003-1019

Abstract: Landslide dam failure can trigger catastrophic flooding in the downstream. However, field observation of such flooding is rarely available, while laboratory experimental studies are sparse. The mechanism of landslide dam failure and the flood has so far remained insufficiently understood. Here, we present an experimental investigation of landslide dam failure and the flood. A total of 28 runs of experiments are carried out in a flume of 80 m × 1.2 m × 0.8 m, with differing inflow discharge, dam composition, dam geometry, and initial breach dimension. An array of twelve automatic water-level probes is deployed to measure the stage hydrographs along the flume, and the video recording of the dam failure processes facilitates an estimation of the widening of initial breach. Under the present experimental conditions with dams composed of homogeneous materials, landslide dam failure is primarily caused by erosion of overtopping flow, and lateral mass collapse is also considerable during the cause of breach widening. Cohesive clay may act to mitigate the seepage through the dam and thus its subsidence and appreciably modulate the dam failure process and the flood. However, the impacts of clay may be readily overwhelmed by a large inflow discharge and initial breach. Gravels in the dam may appreciably depress the rate of the dam failure process and thus modify the flood. The present work provides new experimental data set for testing mathematical models of the flood flow due to landslide dam failure. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Keywords: Landslide dam; Dam failure; Flood; Erosion; Mass collapse; Flume experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-011-9814-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:59:y:2011:i:2:p:1003-1019

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-011-9814-8

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().