Important aspects in the formulation of solid–fluid debris-flow models. Part I. Thermodynamic implications

This article points at some critical issues which are connected with the theoretical formulation of the thermodynamics of solid–fluid mixtures of frictional materials. It is our view that a complete thermodynamic exploitation of the second law of thermodynamics is necessary to obtain the proper parameterizations of the constitutive quantities in such theories. These issues are explained in detail in a recently published book by Schneider and Hutter (Solid–Fluid Mixtures of Frictional Materials in Geophysical and Geotechnical Context, 2009), which we wish to advertize with these notes. The model is a saturated mixture of an arbitrary number of solid and fluid constituents which may be compressible or density preserving, which exhibit visco-frictional (visco-hypoplastic) behavior, but are all subject to the same temperature. Mass exchange between the constituents may account for particle size separation and phase changes due to fragmentation and abrasion. Destabilization of a saturated soil mass from the pre- and the post-critical phases of a catastrophic motion from initiation to deposition is modeled by symmetric tensorial variables which are related to the rate independent parts of the constituent stress tensors.