Infiltration effects on a two-dimensional molecular dynamics model of landslides

Gianluca Martelloni () and Franco Bagnoli ()

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2014, vol. 73, issue 1, 37-62

Abstract: We propose a two-dimensional computational model for deep landslides triggered by rainfall, based on interacting particles or grains. The model describes a vertical section of a fictitious granular material along a slope, in order to study the behavior of a wide-thickness landslide. The triggering of the landslide is caused by the exceeding of two conditions: a threshold speed and a condition on the static friction of the particles, the latter based on the Mohr–Coulomb failure criterion (Coulomb in Mem Acad R Div Sav 7:343–387, 1776 ; Mohr in Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Technischen Mechanik. Ernst, Berlin, 1914 ). The interparticle interactions are represented as a potential that, in the absence of suitable experimental data and due to the arbitrariness of the grain dimension, is modeled similarly to the Lennard-Jones’ one (Lennard-Jones in Proc R Soc Lond A 106(738):463–477, 1924 ), i.e., with an attractive and a repulsive part. For the updating of the particle positions, we use a molecular dynamics method, which is quite suitable for this type of systems (Herrmann and Luding in Continuum Mech Thermodyn 10:189–231, 1998 ). An infiltration scheme is introduced for modeling the increasing pore pressure due to the rainfall. Finally, we also introduce the viscosity in the dynamical equations of motion. The statistical characterization and dynamical behavior of the results of simulations are quite satisfactory relative to real landslides: We obtain a power law distribution of landslide triggering times, and the velocity patterns are typical of real cases, including the acceleration progression. Therefore, we can claim that this type of modeling can represent a new method to simulate landslides triggered by rainfall. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Landslide; Infiltration model; Molecular dynamics; Computational technique (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-013-0944-z (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:73:y:2014:i:1:p:37-62

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-013-0944-z

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 ().