Application of the Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM) to the numerical simulation of landslides

This work explores the application of the Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM) to the simulation of landslides. The PFEM uses a Lagrangian description of the motion and an efficient remeshing algorithm to track accurately the landslide evolving shape while maintaining a good quality of the FEM mesh. A regularized Bingham model is used to describe landslide material. Particular attention is devoted to analyze the effect of landslides runout over water reservoirs. For this reason, the numerical formulation is applied to two benchmark problems related to submarine landslides. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, both problems are solved here for the first time in three dimensions. The numerical results agree very well with the experimental data.