Numerical simulation of the developing course of piping

Piping is the main cause of dangerous situations and one of the most serious threats to levees in China. It is unlikely that Darcy’s law is suitable for evaluation of piping zones; therefore, the ordinary seepage computation based method of simply increasing the permeability coefficient of the piping zone is not appropriate. The discrete element method (DEM) may be a promising alternative to the use of Darcy’s law, but the large number of particles hampers its effective application in practice. In this study, a new approach based on combination of pipe flow in the erosion channel and seepage analysis in the remainder of the levee is proposed. Based on the changeable boundary between the two types of computational domains, the element free Galerkin method (EFG) was employed to facilitate the efficiency of coupling iteration. Examples show that this approach can simulate the main characteristics of developing processes in the erosion channel, which implies that this simplified method can be employed practically.