Numerical simulation of shallow grain-fluid flows in a rotating drum

The traditional approach for simulating debris flows considers the moving mixture as a homogeneous fluid (continuum), having intrinsic rheologic properties that can vary with flow rate and flow characteristics. Since standard viscosimeters cannot be used to study mixtures containing large grain size, as it is the case of debris flows, the use of a large scale rotating drum is here proposed to determine rheological parameters of this type of movements. Rheolgical values obtained for a set of experiments are then adopted in a new modified version of the dynamic model DAN-W to test both the code and the possible use of these parameter values for prediction purposes.