Dry granular flows need special tools

Abstract

Owing to their destructive power, debris flow are the subjects of extensive investigations aiming at characterizing and modeling their inner nature. Laboratory experiments on simulated dam breaks are one important way to trigger and study debris-flow waves. High-speed recordings of granular flows arising from a dam-break-like event can be processed to extract useful information about the flow dynamics. Although the techniques for measuring of velocities in liquid and gas flows are well established, they cannot be used directly on the flows arising from a dam break: this paper presents two required additions that were made to compute such flows. All the resulting quantities are being used to tune a mathematical model describing the observed flows.