Granular Column Collapse of Wet Sand

It is well known that partial saturation enhances the mechanical behaviour of sand. Whilst its influence at small deformation has been largely discussed in the literature, its influence at large deformation remains largely unexplored. This paper investigates the influence of partial saturation on the collapse and flow of dry and wet sand by simulating a well established experiment, called the granular column collapse, using the material point method. The results showed that partial saturation influences the primary failure surface at small deformation, which defined the volume of the mobilised mass, the post-failure flow behaviour and the run-out distance, though not as significantly as one could expect. This can be explained by small differences in the potential energy of the mobilised mass as it will be explained in this paper.