Abstract
Flow in flood dikes, earth dams, and embankments occurs in variably saturated conditions, with pores of the earth material filled partly with water and partly with air. In routine engineering analysis, the influence of pore air is neglected and the air pressure is assumed equal to atmospheric. In some circumstances, for example, during overtopping of the dike by water, the effect of pore air on water flow and stability of the structure can be important. These features cannot be captured with the commonly used Richards equation. In this paper, we analyze earlier experiments on the overtopping of a model dike made of fine sand. During the experiments, a significant amount of air was trapped near the outer slope of the dike, which later escaped through a fracture formed in wet sand. The observations were compared with numerical simulations using the Richards equation and the two-phase immiscible flow model. The deformation and damage of the dike were not modelled, but the initial evolution of the entrapped air pressure (before damage occurred) was in a good agreement with two-phase flow simulations.
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Acknowledgements
The laboratory experiment was conducted in the framework of a research project from the National Science Foundation (Poland) NN 506 31 70 39 “Investigation of microstructure changes in soil and their influence on water and air flow and contaminant transport in flood dikes,” carried out at the Institute of Hydro-Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBW PAN) in Gdańsk (2010-2013).
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Tisler, W., Gorczewska-Langner, W., Leśniewska, D. et al. Simulations of air and water flow in a model dike during overflow experiments. Comput Geosci 23, 325–337 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-018-9796-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-018-9796-7