Abstract
The safety of tailings impoundments has long been a concern of academic researchers globally. The tailings dam breaks are extremely likely to induce secondary disasters such as mudflows, landslides and water and soil pollution, thus further aggravating the risk of accidents. On the basis of practical engineering, this study performed a dam-break physical model experiment and theoretical analysis to examine tailings dam overtopping and dam body collapse processes. It also discussed the leaked tailings flow evolution characteristics after dam failure, based on important parameters such as the dam-breach variation rules after dam break, flow velocity of the leaked tailings flow, particle deposition characteristics and submerged depth. Our research discovered that dam-breach development was mainly constituted by water current erosion-induced longitudinal downcutting and dam-breach slope instability-caused horizontal expansion. A large sand inrush amount resulted in a high downstream flow rate and large sediment depth after dam failure. In addition, when the sampling site was > 100 cm (model scale) away from the dam site, the discharged tailings flow size grading phenomenon was obvious during dam breach, and the particle size gradually decreased with increasing distance between the sampling characteristic sites and dam site.
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Acknowledgement
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 51904040]; the General Program of Chongqing Natural Science Foundation Project [Grant No. cstc2020jcyj-msxmX0747]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [Grant Nos. 2020CDJQY-A045 and 2020CDJ-LHZZ-003]; the Venture and Innovation Support Program for Chongqing Overseas Returnees [Grant No. cx2018071]; and the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University [Grant No. IRT_17R112]. The authors would like to acknowledge the colleagues from the State Key Laboratory of Coal Mine Disaster Dynamics and Control for their perspectives and suggestions related to data collection and statistical analysis.
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XD, ST and GW were responsible for methodology, data curation and formal analysis and writing-original draft preparation. ST was responsible for visualization and funding acquisition and writing-reviewing and editing. ST, YL and JC were responsible for supervision. ST, GW, YL and JC were responsible for project administration. GW was responsible for validation and conceptualization. YL and JC were responsible for investigation and conceptualization. All authors gave final approval for publication.
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Tian, S., Dai, X., Wang, G. et al. Formation and evolution characteristics of dam breach and tailings flow from dam failure: an experimental study. Nat Hazards 107, 1621–1638 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-021-04649-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-021-04649-1