Preliminary Evaluation of Existing Breaching Erosion Models

The ability to estimate the erosion rate along an underwater breach face is crucial to understand the evolution of breaching failure. To this end, breaching erosion models were developed and applied in numerical models. However, these erosion models have never been validated, owing to the scarcity of direct measurements of turbidity currents that accompany breaching. The aim of this study is to evaluate the existing breaching erosion models using direct measurements of recently performed laboratory experiments on breaching flow slides. We found out that the erosion model put forward by Mastbergen & Van Den Berg (2003) provides good agreement with the data and performs better than the one proposed by Van Rhee (2015). The latter tends to overestimate the erosion rate, particularly at steeper slopes.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Environmental Fluid Mechanic