Red Earth Engineering A Geosyntec Company reposted this
Every Tailings Dam Breach Analysis hinges on the breach outflow hydrograph: it drives how far the flow goes, how fast it arrives, and what it inundates. Yet the empirical methods we rely on are built for water-retaining dams, and tailings don't behave like water. Applying these formulas can misrepresent peak discharge and timing. That gap is the motivation behind our paper. Rather than prescribing a breach and release volume, we model how the liquefied tailings flow and let that produce the hydrograph, using the Material Point Method (#MPM). The 2019 Brumadinho (Feijão Dam I) failure took more than 270 lives, and is exactly why getting these predictions right matters. We use it here as a benchmark, recreated with MPM and assuming the tailings have mobilised liquefied strengths to capture the runout. The animation shows the run-out (material distribution) and the hydrograph developing in real time (top), with velocity contours and the velocity of the top 1% of material points (bottom), for one of the sensitivity cases (su/σ′vo = 0.04) in the paper. A real team effort with my friends and colleagues Sudheer S Prabhu, David Reid, and Felipe Urbina Espinosa at Red Earth Engineering A Geosyntec Company, and Riccardo Fanni from WSP. This was part of a collaboration with ITASCA Software, through which we have been beta testing #MPoint3D, and made possible by Marcos Arroyo, who shared the survey data that allowed us to build the model geometry. Special thanks to Matthew Purvance and Corné Coetzee for their insights which paved the way for the development of these models. I'll be presenting the full paper at #ICOLD2026 in Guadalajara next week. Come say hello if you are there. Geosyntec Consultants Geosyntec REELab Geosyntec Consultants Australia #Tailings #DamSafety #TailingsManagement