By Paul Vigneaux, profesor de la Escuela Normal Superior de Lyon, Francia
Seminar Date: 2020-11-12
In this talk, we describe the numerical resolution of a shallow water viscoplastic flow model. Viscoplastic materials are characterized by the existence of a yield stress: below a certain critical threshold in the imposed stress, there is no deformation and the material behaves like a rigid solid, but when that yield value is exceeded, the material flows like a fluid. In the context of avalanches, it means that after going down a slope, the material can stop and its free surface has a non-trivial shape, as opposed to the case of water (Newtonian fluid). The model involves variational inequalities associated with the yield threshold: finite-volume schemes are used together with duality methods (namely Augmented Lagrangian and Bermudez-Moreno) to discretize the problem. To be able to accurately simulate the stopping behaviour of the avalanche, new schemes need to be designed, involving the classical notion of well-balancing. In the present context, it needs to be extended to take into account the viscoplastic nature of the material as well as general bottoms with wet/dry fronts which are encountered in geophysical configurations (e.g. landslides, debris or lava flows, snow avalanches). We illustrate the properties of these schemes on simulations of dense snow avalanches in the Taconnaz path (Chamonix, Mont Blanc, France), one of the longest in Europe.