Investigation of flow characteristics of landslide materials through
pore space topology and complex network analysis
Abstract
Unlike embankments, earth dams, and other man-made structures, most
landslide dams are formed by rapid accumulation of rock or debris rather
than mechanical compaction; thus, they are loose and pose a great risk
of seepage failure. Landslide materials usually have complex pore
structures with randomly distributed pores of various sizes, making the
flow and transport processes very complex. Aiming at these challenges,
we have studied the influences of pore structure on the micro-and
macro-scale flow characteristics of landslide materials. First,
landslide materials are simplified as spherical granular packings with
wide grain size distributions. Then, we use finite difference method
(FDM) and lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) to simulate the fluid flow
through granular packings and calculate their permeability. We find that
both the correlation between pore-scale velocity and throat diameters
and the correlation between macroscopic permeability and average throat
diameters follow a power-law scaling with an exponent close to 2, in
agreement with the Hagen–Poiseuille equation for laminar flow in pipes,
suggesting that the relationships in complex pore structures are
conformed with the simple theory. Moreover, we propose a new method by
combining pore networks and complex networks to characterize the pore
structure. The network analysis illustrates that granular packings with
different permeability display distinctive distributions of pore throat
size and pore connectivity and their correlations. Compared with
disassortative pore networks, assortative ones generally have higher
permeability. Furthermore, pores with larger closeness centrality have
higher flow efficiency that results in higher macroscopic permeability.