MADflow

Originally developed for academic research, MADflow is a light-weight yet highly accurate numerical simulation tool for mobility analysis of gravity-driven flows of tailings, soil, rock and/or water mixtures. It is particularly suited for studying phenomena such as debris flows, tailings flow, mudflows, mud floods, flowslides and avalanches.

Being able to integrate complex 3D terrain or simplified 2D sections, MADflow stands out as a robust, strictly volume-conservative, depth-averaged dynamical model. It incorporates widely used rheological constitutive relationships tailored for non-Newtonian flows (including granular flows), ranging from frictional-based, visco-plastic, to their combination, to capture various flow behaviour from low to high solids concentrations. The model ensures realistic stress response to strain during movement, especially in flows with high solids concentration.

For scenarios involving fast landslides or avalanches, MADflow offers the option to activate centripetal effects. Additionally, it includes advanced capabilities for simulating the progressive shear mixing of two-layer materials using friction-based models. It is also capable of calculating the structural impacts on objects along the flow path, including the inertia and soil resistance forces at specific depths.

The software supports features crucial for comprehensive simulation, such as entrainment and erosion, temporal and spatial variations of yield stress, viscosity and specific weight of the flow mixture, as well as considerations for hydrodynamic drag and the onset of hydroplaning in submarine debris flows.

Available on both Windows and Linux, MADflow is computationally efficient and fully parallelized. It harnesses optimal scalability across both CPU architectures (utilizing OpenMP) and GPU resources (with CUDA-capable devices), providing speedy computations and reducing run times significantly from days to hours, from hours to minutes even seconds compared to using old-technology, non-GPU architectures.

Please contact the author for the latest free version, at the author's discretion. Please note that while the software is freely available, the author does not provide technical support or consultation services.

Introduction

MADflow is a robust depth-averaged mobility analysis tool for gravity-driven flow of tailings, soil, rock and/or water mixtures.

Applications

MADflow is equipped with commonly used rheologies which have been validated / calibrated with laboratory experiments / field cases.

Tailings Dam

MADflow is capable of simulating the four breach cases (Cases 1A, 1B, 2A, and 2B) implementing the novel two-process modelling technique as described in CDA 2021 Technical Bulletin for Tailings Dam Breach Analysis.

Waste Dumps

MADflow is capable of predicting potential failure runout zone for a mine waste dump or stockpile facility from mobilization to runout.

Gallery

Selective collections of MADflow simulation results, including laboratory experiment validation and field case history matching.

Landslides or tailings dam failures are highly destructive phenomena, claiming hundreds of lives and causing millions of dollars of property damages throughout the world each year. The catastrophic nature leads this kind of disasters to be considered as one of the most threatening hazards in some regions of the world.