Preliminary Evaluation of Existing Breaching Erosion Models

Abstract

The ability to estimate the erosion rate along an underwater breach face is crucial to understand the evolution of breaching failure. To this end, breaching erosion models were developed and applied in numerical models. However, these erosion models have never been validated, owing to the scarcity of direct measurements of turbidity currents that accompany breaching. The aim of this study is to evaluate the existing breaching erosion models using direct measurements of recently performed laboratory experiments on breaching flow slides. We found out that the erosion model put forward by Mastbergen & Van Den Berg (2003) provides good agreement with the data and performs better than the one proposed by Van Rhee (2015). The latter tends to overestimate the erosion rate, particularly at steeper slopes.