Y. L. Luo,
Volume 11, Issue 1 (5-2013)
The occurrence of piping failures in earth structures demonstrates the urgency and importance of studying piping. With this
intention, a new piping model was developed in the framework of continuum mixture theory. Assuming that porous media are
comprised of solid skeleton phase, fluid phase and fluidized fine particles phase, the fluidized fine particles phase is considered
to be a special solute migrating with the fluid phase. The three phases interact while being constrained by the mass conservation
equations of the three phases, and a sink term was introduced into the mass conservation equation of the solid skeleton phase to
describe the erosion of fluidized fine particles, then a new continuum fluid-particle coupled piping model was established and
validated. The validation indicates that the proposed model can predict the piping development of complicated structures under
complex boundary and flow conditions, and reflect the dynamic changes of porosity, permeability and pore pressure in the
evolution of piping.