Output details

A thermo-mechanical model for the catastrophic collapse of large landslides

Significance of output:

Large-scale, catastrophic landslides are a threat to human life and infrastructure (e.g. the 1963 Vajont slide that destroyed a dam reservoir claiming over 2,000 lives.) The paper offers a possible explanation for the otherwise unpredictably high final velocity of some landslides, by developing the first thermo-poro-mechanical landslide model that is based on a general constitutive law for the soil. This model constitutes a first step towards the development of advanced, predictive models for hazard mitigation. A presentation of this work was awarded a prize at the 2008 Annual Workshop of UK's Association for Computational Mechanics in Engineering.