Flow induced forces in porous media with application to internal erosion

For a comprehensive understanding of internal erosion in embankment dams it is necessary to elucidate the detailed seepage flow. A neat tool that can be used for this purpose is Computational Fluid Dynamics in which forces on individual particles in a porous media can be derived. The model geometry chosen to represent the porous media is a hexagonal array of spheres into which smaller particles are introduced which are supposed to move at a certain level of flow induced forces. It is shown that the mesh deformation method introduced has a potential to model internal erosion.