Scientist Simulates an Avalanche's Dangerous Mechanics in 3D

An avalanche is an extremely complex event, with multiple parameters and variables coming into play from the time the avalanche is triggered until it ends. Drawing on the fact that the snow in an avalanche can behave like both a solid and a fluid, EPFL  researcher Johan Gaume has created a highly accurate digital simulation of an avalanche. His work, which offers unprecedented insight into how avalanches work, could be used to improve risk management in the mountains. Gaume worked with 3D modeling experts at the University of California Los Angeles. The Swiss and US researchers created the first realistic and scientifically rigorous simulation of a snow slab avalanche – a type of avalanche that occurs when a very clear linear crack appears at the top of the snowpack. Snow slab avalanches are hard to predict and often triggered by skiers or walkers, making them the most dangerous type of avalanche.

Transcript

00:00:03 it's very difficult to simulate avalanches because snow is a very complex material and mechanical behavior is not fully understood yet another problem is that snow can behave like a solid or like a fluid depending on the loading and for example snow on the ground and snowpack stability are generally treated using solid mechanics while the flow of an avalanche is

00:00:25 usually characterized using three dynamics it's very difficult to find a unified and large strain framework to simulate the whole Avalanche process our main contribution is the development of a new snow mechanical model which takes into account a lot of important ingredients so for example we are able to account for snow compaction and hardening we also managed to model snow

00:00:48 fracture but most importantly we are able to simulate for the first time the observed collapse of the weak layer which is a crucial process for the release of a slab Vilanch in addition we used the new numerical model called NPM it's a hybrid method which was already used and further extended by UCLA mathematicians to simulate the snow in the Disney movie frozen and it allowed

00:01:11 us for the first time to simulate both the release and the flow of the Avalanche at the slope scale and in three dimensions we expect our new model to contribute to improve avalanche forecasting and risk management because we can now simulate and thus predict the release size of an avalanche which is currently missing in operational models also we can expect our model to have

00:01:31 interesting applications in graphics and in animation we did not only reproduce the physics well but we also made a really nice rendering of our videos