Dispersive landslide

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel dispersive wave equation for landslides based on a non-hydrostatic mass flow model, revealing unique dispersion characteristics and the existence of an anti-restoring force in landslides.

Contribution

The paper derives a new dispersive wave equation for landslides that generalizes classical water wave dispersion and highlights the unique dispersion properties of landslides.

Findings

Dispersion relation for landslides differs from water waves.

Group velocity is significantly lower than phase velocity.

Dispersion number increases rapidly with wave number.

Abstract

Considering the non-hydrostatic mass flow model (Pudasaini, 2022), here, we derive a novel dispersive wave equation for landslide. The new dispersive wave for landslide recovers the classical dispersive water waves as a special case. We show that the frequency dispersion relation for landslide is inherently different than the classical frequency dispersion for water waves. The wave frequency with dispersion increases non-linearly as a function of the wave number. For dispersive landslide, the wave frequency without dispersion appears to heavily overestimate the dispersive wave frequency for higher wave number. Due to the dispersion term emerging from the non-hydrostatic contribution for landslide, the phase velocity becomes a function of the wave number. This gives rise to the group velocity that is significantly different from the phase velocity, characterizing the dispersive mass flow. The dispersive phase velocity and group velocity decrease non-linearly with the wave number. Yet, the group velocity is substantially lower than the phase velocity. We analytically derive a dispersion number as the ratio between the phase velocity and the group velocity, which measures the deviation of the group velocity from the phase velocity, provides a dynamic scaling between them and summarizes the overall effect of dispersion in the mass flow. The dispersion number for landslide increases rapidly with the wave number, which is in contrast to the dispersion in water waves. With the definition of the effective dispersive lateral stress, we prove the existence of an anti-restoring force in landslide. We reveal the fact that due to the anti-restoring force, landslides are more dispersive than the piano strings. So, the wave dispersion in landslide is fundamentally different than the wave dispersion in the piano string. Our model constitutes a foundation for the wave phenomenon in dispersive mass flows.