A mechanical erosion model for two-phase mass flows

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel two-phase erosion-deposition model for geophysical mass flows, capturing complex erosion, entrainment, and deposition processes with physical consistency, and demonstrating how erosion enhances flow mobility.

Contribution

It presents a process-based, physically consistent two-phase erosion-deposition model that improves understanding of mass flow mechanics and resolves the mass mobility dilemma.

Findings

Erosion enhances mass flow mobility.

The model captures complex frontal surge dynamics.

Mechanically consistent closures for erosion coefficients.

Abstract

Erosion, entrainment and deposition are complex and dominant, but yet poorly understood, mechanical processes in geophysical mass flows. Here, we propose a novel, process-based, two-phase, erosion-deposition model capable of adequately describing these complex phenomena commonly observed in landslides, avalanches, debris flows and bedload transport. The model is based on the jump in the momentum flux including changes of material and flow properties along the flow-bed interface and enhances an existing general two-phase mass flow model (Pudasaini, 2012). A two-phase variably saturated erodible basal morphology is introduced and allows for the evolution of erosion-deposition-depths, incorporating the inherent physical process including momentum and rheological changes of the flowing mixture. By rigorous derivation, we show that appropriate incorporation of the mass and momentum productions or losses in conservative model formulation is essential for the physically correct and mathematically consistent description of erosion-entrainment-deposition processes. We show that mechanically deposition is the reversed process of erosion. We derive mechanically consistent closures for coefficients emerging in the erosion rate models. We prove that effectively reduced friction in erosion is equivalent to the momentum production. With this, we solve the long standing dilemma of mass mobility, and show that erosion enhances the mass flow mobility. The novel enhanced real two-phase model reveals some major aspects of the mechanics associated with erosion, entrainment and deposition. The model appropriately captures the emergence and propagation of complex frontal surge dynamics associated with the frontal ambient-drag with erosion.