Gravity-Driven Monodisperse Avalanches: Inertial- to Frictional-Dominated Flow Article uri icon

abstract

  • A set of experiments on avalanches—each one with a single particle size (monodisperse)—is presented. Experiments were performed with different flume lengths, inclinations, and roughness, for different avalanching masses and particle sizes. A transition from an inertial behavior to a frictional dominated one is observed at a particle size of 1 mm, in all cases. Taking into account the energy dissipated during each step of the avalanching process, we inferred a scaling function that allowed us to collapse all experimental data into a single curve. The transition from an inertial to a frictional dominated regime is explained in terms of the increasing number of particles per unit mass with decreasing particle size, for which the external shear activates a growing number of internal degrees of freedom in which the energy is dissipated. Molecular dynamic numerical simulations showed consistency with the suggested hypothesis of higher dissipated power for larger number of avalanching particles (smaller grain size). © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature.

publication date

  • 2020-01-01