Spatial variability effect of internal friction angle on the post-failure behavior of landslides using a random and non-Newtonian fluid based SPH method

This study proposed a random Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method for analyzing the post-failure behavior of landslides, which is based on the Karhunen–Loève (K-L) expansion, the non-Newtonian fluid model, and the OpenMP parallel framework. Then, the applicability of this method was validated by comparing the generated random field with theoretical result and by simulating the post-failure process of an actual landslide. Thereafter, an illustrative landslide example was created and simulated to obtain the spatial variability effect of internal friction angle on the post-failure behavior of landslides under different coefficients of variation (COVs) and correlation lengths (CLs). As a conclusion, the reinforcement with materials of a larger friction angle can reduce the runout distance and impact the force of a landslide. As the increase of COV, the distribution range of influence zones also increases, which indicates that the deviation of influence zones becomes large. In addition, the correlation length in Monte Carlo simulations should not be too small, otherwise the variation range of influence zones will be underestimated.