Influence analysis of spatially variable cohesion on flow process and run-out distance of landslides

The landslide is one of the most serious natural hazards that could greatly change the natural and man-made environments through the high-speed spreading and long-distance sliding. It has been widely accepted that the geomaterials are usually heterogenous with the nature of spatial variability that will affect the spatiotemporal evolution of a landslide. To address this problem, this study proposed a stochastic non-Newtonian smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model to analyze the flow process and run-out distance of landslides under spatially variable cohesion. Based on a conceptual landslide, the sliding process and run-out distance of each random sample were obtained from the Monte Carlo simulations. According to analysis results, the post-failure process and run-out distance distribution were discussed to reveal the influences of mean value ad coefficient of variation. Finally, simulated data were fitted to infer which type of distribution the run-out distance belongs to, and the determination coefficients for different distribution types were calculated to verify the proposed inference. It can be found that the average run-out distance changes with the mean cohesion, the distribution becomes wider as the coefficient of variation increases and the landslide run-out distance has the same distribution type as that of cohesion.