Dry granular flow modelling including erosion and deposition

In this paper, we considered dense avalanches made of dry and cohesion-less snow as gravitational granular flows. We used an effective friction law derived from the recent progress on granular behaviour research to represent momentum loss. We formulated a simple erosion and deposition model where the eroded and deposited mass fluxes are estimated from the knowledge of the starting and stopping conditions on a given slope angle. We adopted the shallow water hypothesis and introduced the new formulation of erosion and deposition processes. We solved the equations thanks to an accurate finite volumes solver scheme, using a non-structured mesh. This allows an easy integration of defence structures and singularities. Each component of this model was tested using analytical solutions and experimental laboratory data. Finally, we used the February 1999 Taconnaz avalanche event to test this model on a real snow avalanche case. These tests gave promising results.