Abstract
The Wenchuan earthquake (Mw 8.0) on May 12, 2008 led to abundant loose landslide deposits in the southwestern mountainous areas of China. Field observations reveal that this loose soil is ideal source material for debris flows and landslides several years after the earthquake, particularly when mobilized by rainfall. An important slope failure mechanism is rainfall infiltration-induced fines migration within soil slopes. Previous studies of fine particle migration in soil mainly focused on seepage experiments, mid-scale flume tests with rainfall as a boundary condition, and other macro-scale methods. However, these methods have not been able to directly obtain parameters of pore structures, velocity of fine particles, and pore pressure inside soil samples which could be used to quantify the internal erosion process. In this study, the characteristics of wide-grading loose soils (WGLS) pore structure are analyzed quantitatively with serial tomography which uses scanning electron microscopy. The results of statistical analysis of pore size distribution are also presented. Compared with traditional silty soil with bimodal pore size distributions, WGLS corresponds to a second peak with much larger diameter particles. Numerical simulation using the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) coupled with the Discrete Element Method (DEM) is used to investigate the jamming probability of fine particle migration through three different samples during seepage. Simulation results indicate that jamming is most prevalent in samples with smaller pores that are dominated by bimodal pore size distributions, which agrees with previous analytical solutions.
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Acknowledgements
The study here is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 42077238 and 41941019), the Research Fund Program of the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering (2020-KY-04), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA23090401). Dr. Chaoxu Guo acknowledges support from the Fujian province Science Foundation for Young Scientists (grant number 2017J05074) and International (regional) cooperation and exchange projects from National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 41861134011). We thank Warwick Hastie, PhD from Liwen Bianji, Edanz Group China (www.liwenbianji.cn/ac), for editing the English text of a draft of this manuscript.
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Cui, Y., Yin, Y., Guo, C. (2021). Investigation of Internal Erosion of Wide Grading Loose Soil—A Micromechanics-Based Study. In: Arbanas, Ž., Bobrowsky, P.T., Konagai, K., Sassa, K., Takara, K. (eds) Understanding and Reducing Landslide Disaster Risk. WLF 2020. ICL Contribution to Landslide Disaster Risk Reduction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60713-5_16
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