Céline Longchamp
Director: Prof. Michel Jaboyedoff
Jury: Prof. Giovanni Crosta, Prof. Yury Podladchikov, Dr. Irene Manzella, Prof. Suren Erkman
As rock avalanches are rare catastrophic events in which granular masses of rock debris flow at high speeds, commonly with unusually long runout distances, analog and numerical modeling can provide important information about their behavior. This thesis is composed of three main contributions: (1) laboratory experiments in order to demonstrate that the basal roughness and the grainsize as well as the volume and slope angle are important parameters of the motion of a dry granular mass; (2) the analysis of rock avalanche dynamics by means of a detailed structural analysis of the deposits coming from data of 3D measurements of mass movements of different magnitudes, from decimeter level scale laboratory experiments to well-studied rock avalanches of several square kilometers magnitude; (3) development of a numerical model to simulate the laboratory experiments.
Laboratory experiments are performed with a tilting plane. Granular material is released, chutes down a slope, propagates and finally stops on a horizontal surface. Different grainsizes (115, 545 and 2605 ?m) and substratum roughness (simulated by sandpapers with grainsize from 8.4 to 269 ?m) are used in order to understand their influence on the motion of a granular mass. This work shows that there is a logarithmic relation between the substratum roughness and the motion of the granular flow. For same volume, slope angle and fall height, the runout of the mass is comprised between 4.5 and 11 cm. The influence of the volume and the slope angle is also investigated. The runout increases from 8 to 11 cm with volumes from 300 to 600 cm3. Contrarily to the volume, the slope angle (from 35° to 60°) influences greatly the runout of the mass front (from 5 to 20 cm).
In order to emphasize and better detect the fault structures present in the deposits, we applied a median filter with different moving windows sizes (from 3×3 to 9×9 nearest neighbors) to the 3D datasets and a gradient operator along the direction of propagation. The application of these filters on the datasets results in: (1) a precise mapping of the longitudinal and transversal displacement features observed at the surface of the deposits; (2) a more accurate interpretation of the relative movements along the deposit (i.e. normal, strike-slip, inverse faults) by using cross-sections. Results show how the use of filtering techniques reveals disguised features in the original point cloud and that similar displacement patterns are observable both in the laboratory simulation and in the real scale avalanche, regardless the size of the avalanche.
To simulate the analog granular flow, a numerical model based on the continuum mechanics approach and the solving of the shallow water equations was used. In this model, the avalanche is described from a Eulerian point of view within a continuum framework as single phase of incompressible granular material. The interaction of the flowing layer with the substratum follows a Mohr-Coulomb friction law. Within same initial conditions (slope, volume, basal friction, height of fall and initial velocity), results obtained with the numerical model are similar to those observed in the analog model. In both cases, the runout of the mass is comparable and the size of deposits matches well. Moreover, both analog and numerical modeling provide velocities of same magnitudes. In this study, we highlighted the importance of the friction on a flowing mass and the influence of the numerical resolution on the propagation. The combination of the fluid dynamics equations with the frictional law enables the self-channelization and the stop of the granular mass.
