Dynamic interactions between the vadose and phreatic zones during breaking solitary wave runup and drawdown over a fine sand beach

The objective of this work is to investigate the dynamic interactions between the vadose and the phreatic zones during breaking solitary wave runup and drawdown over a fine sand beach. Extreme wave runup and drawdown in the nearshore region can lead to soil failure in the form of severe erosion, liquefaction, or slope instability. However, the physics of the nearshore region is difficult to simulate numerically due to the greatly varying time scales between the four governing processes: loading and unloading caused by wave runup and drawdown, propagation of the saturation front, pore pressure diffusion, and soil consolidation. Such processes are also difficult to simulate experimentally via model-scale wave tank studies due to the inability to satisfy all the similarity requirements for both the wave and the porous media in a 1g environment. Hence, the goal of this work is to perform a 1D study using a multiphase model to describe the transient responses of the species saturation, pore fluid pressure, effective stresses, and skeleton deformation. Results are shown for three simulations: (1) full-scale simulation, (2) 1:20 laboratory-scale simulation without scaling of the porous media, and (3) 1:20 laboratory-scale with consistent scaling of the soil permeability. The results suggest that the scaling of porous media between the pore fluids and soil skeleton has a significant influence on the transient response of both the vadose and the phreatic zones.