Abstract
The mesh-based numerical methods such as finite element, finite difference and finite volume methods are often used, as classical methods, to solve the flow field problems. However, despite their great success, they suffer from limitations in several aspects, such as numerical diffusion, dealing with complex geometries and problems with large deformations of boundaries. Applying mesh-free methods are a remedy for such kind of problems as they have the ability in dealing with problems with large deformation. In this paper, a 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics method, which is a mesh-free Lagrangian method, was applied to simulate snow avalanche mechanisms. The snow was considered as a Bingham fluid and the snow viscosity was calculated based on the Bingham constitutive model, on the basis of Coulomb's failure criterion. An equivalent Newtonian viscosity is calculated to express the Bingham viscosity into Navier-Stokes equations. A simple and small scale snow avalanche experiment with different types of obstacles was simulated using the SPH method. Numerical results showed that, in the most cases, good agreements were found by the means of leading edge position and travel length.
