Centrifuge Experiment on Capture Performance of Open-Type Sabo Dam with Its Numerical Analysis

Abstract

Open-type Sabo dam captures the advantage of solids mitigating the potential energy of fluids, but the disadvantage is that a small amount of debris flow passes through the dam, the reason for this comes from the grid size of the dam, the inclination angle of the dam, the stone size among the debris flow, etc. This study aims to investigate the influence of the inclination angle on the capture performance of the open-type Sabo dam. A model experiment is conducted based on the centrifuge machine. Three open-type Sabo dam models reflecting different inclination angles of 0° (vertical form), 20°, and 40° are used to capture the debris flow. The concentration of the large particle (CLP) for the debris flow configuration is set to 20% and 33%, respectively. The experimental results indicate that the open-type Sabo dam with 0° inclination angle has the best capture rate, 93%–94%. An increase in inclination decreases the capture rate for debris flows. A 40° inclination angle decreases the capture rate by 2%–8%, and this decrease is exacerbated by an increase in CLP of the debris flow. Additionally, the smoothed-particle hydrodynamics–distributed contact distinct element method (SPH–DCDEM) has a good reproduction for the experimental result of the capture rate, with an error of 12%–25%.