The experimental study on the geometric similarity of debris flow deposition

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Chinese economy, many important building projects are planned on debris fans. Because of their location, these new constructions will be threatened by debris flows. Thus, it is important to study debris flow deposition in different conditions. Twenty debris fans under different experimental conditions are considered in order to examine the geometric similarity of debris flow deposition. The experimental results show that the cross-section, profile, and plane con guration of debris fans all have parabolic distributions. The quadratic term coefficients (a1, a2) of the debris fan cross-section and profile define the average deposition slope in the longitudinal and transverse directions. For the plane configuration, -b3/2a3 is the degree of deviation of the maximum downstream deposition width and c3 is the ratio of the deposition width at the outlet to the maximum deposition width.