Citation

Xenakis AM, Lind SJ, Stansby PK, Rogers BD. Proc. Math. Phys. Eng. Sci. 2017; 473(2199): e20160674.

Affiliation

School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, The Royal Society)

DOI

10.1098/rspa.2016.0674

PMID

28413334

PMCID

PMC5378232

Abstract

Tsunamis caused by landslides may result in significant destruction of the surroundings with both societal and industrial impact. The 1958 Lituya Bay landslide and tsunami is a recent and well-documented terrestrial landslide generating a tsunami with a run-up of 524 m. Although recent computational techniques have shown good performance in the estimation of the run-up height, they fail to capture all the physical processes, in particular, the landslide-entry profile and interaction with the water. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a versatile numerical technique for describing free-surface and multi-phase flows, particularly those that exhibit highly nonlinear deformation in landslide-generated tsunamis. In the current work, the novel multi-phase incompressible SPH method with shifting is applied to the Lituya Bay tsunami and landslide and is the first methodology able to reproduce realistically both the run-up and landslide-entry as documented in a benchmark experiment. The method is the first paper to develop a realistic implementation of the physics that in addition to the non-Newtonian rheology of the landslide includes turbulence in the water phase and soil saturation. Sensitivity to the experimental initial conditions is also considered. This work demonstrates the ability of the proposed method in modelling challenging environmental multi-phase, non-Newtonian and turbulent flows.

Language: en

Keywords

incompressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics; non-Newtonian; run-up; saturation; subaerial landslides; tsunami