DEVELOPMENT OF A GUI FOR THE PARAMETRIC STUDY OF MASS FLOW RATES USING THE MATERIAL POINT METHOD

Resumo

Measuring flow rates in engineering applications, whether it’s fluid or solid, it’s an important

task as it often leads to good phenomenon characterization. Particularly, in marine environments, it pro-
vides a metric that can be used to safeguard facilities susceptible to landslides. Solving flow rate related

problems is a difficult task due to fluid-structure interactions, nonlinearities and phase transitions. There-
fore, analytical solutions can be very complex, even impossible to achieve, which usually are the cases

approached by geotechnical engineering. Hence, it’s preferable to use numerical techniques to solve such
problems. In this regard, the material point method is a Lagrangian numerical method where particles
move through a background mesh, avoiding distortion problems. This work develops a parametric study
of the mass flow rate of a submarine landslide using the software E-Sub, a numerical analysis software
developed by the Laboratory of Scientific Computing and Visualization (LCCV). Modelling a submarine
landslide often involves many parameters which can dramatically alter the results of the simulation. For
this reason, a graphical user interface was developed in which the model is visualized. Furthermore, the
interface also allows marking out section planes in which the flow rate is going to be analysed. Lastly,
our results showed that the ocean floor plays a major role on all other variables involved in the problem,
in which minor changes on its angle lead to bigger changes into flow rates.