Determination of the abrasion of aprons of dams by debris flow

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical equation for the quantitative determination of the abrasion rate of concrete stilling basins by the impact of sediment in debris flow. The grain size in the experiments is not as big as the grain size of natural debris flow and the independent contribution of sediment impact on abrasion is not reported in previous studies. Therefore, the independent contribution of coarse-grain sediments impact on concrete slab investigated in this paper using two sets of experiments. Linear, power and exponential correlation equations were developed relating abrasion and cumulative potential energy per unit weight of concrete stilling basin using the first set of experiments. The equations were verified using a second set of experiments. The power equation was selected using the mean absolute relative error as the criterion. The study reveals that the reduced effect of water is less than 10% for dimensionless depth smaller than one.