ABSTRACT
This paper presents an experimental study of tailings dams in laboratory. The highly transient nature of the phenomena studied imposes constraints on the measurement techniques than can be used. Imaging techniques are used for the present analysis since they combine both high temporal and spatial resolutions. For an efficient analysis of the velocity field a combined PIV-PTV tool is used. In this approach the PIV technique is first applied to determine an estimator for the sediment layer velocity field and the obtained velocity field is then used as a displacement estimator for the PTV approach. In this method the first step (PIV) provides a global estimation of the sediments velocity field and in the second step (PTV) a particle-by-particle analysis is used to increase the spatial resolution of the measurements. This combined technique is then applied to an example of tailings dam-break flow.
