Apparatus for erosion of hydraulic concrete

The research contributes to the dam safety field. Specifically, Brazil presents recent dam safety legislation and numerous rivers in the region of sandy soils, where erosion by the water-solid mixture brings serious consequences. This study proposes a simple apparatus that adds features of existing devices to provide reliable experiments, which may reproduce real field conditions of the phenomenon. The numerical approach was possible due the fact that the apparatus had enough geometry and operation to be parametrized in the CFD software. The simulations were faithful to experiments, opening field for new advances to define erosion models for heterogeneous materials to be quite solid and replicable.