Keynote Lecturer: Umberto Perego A PFEM approach to the simulation of landslide generated water-waves V International Conference on Computational Methods for Coupled Problems in Science and Engineering COUPLED PROBLEMS 2013 S. Idelsohn, M. Papadrakakis and B. Schrefler (Eds) A PFEM APPROACH TO THE SIMULATION OF LANDSLIDE GENERATED WATER-WAVES MASSIMILIANO CREMONESI * , CLAUDIO DI PRISCO * AND UMBERTO PEREGO * * Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Politecnico di Milano Piazza Leonardo Da Vinci, 32, 20133 Milan, Italy e-mail:cremonesi@stru.polimi.it, claudio.diprisco@polimi.it, umberto.perego@polimi.it Key words: landslide simulation, PFEM, Lagrangian approach Abstract. A Particle Finite Element Method is here applied to the simulation of landslide-water interaction. An elastic-visco-plastic non-Newtonian, Bingham-like con- stitutive model has been used to describe the landslide material. Two examples are shown to show the potential of the approach. 1 INTRODUCTION Catastrophic landslides impinging into water reservoirs may generate impulsive waves whose propagation can cause considerable damages. This is an exceptional natural haz- ard, usually associated with erosion, fault movements, earthquakes, heavy rainfalls or storms. The prediction of landslides velocity, runout distance and travelling path is use- ful for preventing and mitigating the consequences of these events. Recent developments in the simulation techniques for coupled problems have led to efficient analysis procedures allowing for the accurate reproduction of landslide-reservoir interactions (see for example [1, 2]). The numerical analysis of these events requires capabilities for tracking interfaces and free surfaces undergoing large displacements, and accounting for the mixing of dif- ferent constituents, for complex constitutive behaviours and for multi-physics processes. A recently developed Lagrangian finite element approach formulated in the spirit of the Particle Finite Element Method [3, 4, 5] is here reconsidered and adapted to the specific case of landslide-reservoir interaction. Owing to its capability of automatically tracking free-surfaces and interfaces, the pro- posed method is particularly suitable for the simulation of landslide-water interaction problems, which are dominated by fast propagating waves and interfaces. 756