10 / 2025-04-24 11:27:09

Observations of sand-boils in geocentrifuge tests

As the population in deltas continues to increase, and extreme weather events happen more often and more unexpectedly, the urgency of flood protection is ever large. A common failure mechanism for levees in The Netherlands is backward erosion piping (BEP). Understanding how BEP initiates and progresses can help to understand levee stability and to create safer and more resilient deltas. From recent experiments in a geocentrifuge installation, the formation of sand-boils at the toe of a levee model was observed. Not only were sand-boils discovered along the diagonal crack at the toe, but also from lateral cracks in the clay cover layer. This paper will report the configuration of sand-boils observed in a total of 19 centrifuge tests on levee stability conducted in two test series.