Uniform motion of debris flows over erodible beds

We compare the results of a theory recently developed by Berzi and Jenkins to the few experimental results available in the literature on uniform debris flows over erodible beds. In the theory, there are four material parameters that depend on the type of granular material, the interstitial fluid and the sidewalls in the experiments. Here, we determine those parameters for four different experimental configurations and show that the theory is able to reproduce the observed behaviour. The agreement with the experiments suggests that the approximate theory of Berzi and Jenkins could be useful in practical applications in civil engineering.