The Impact Force of Large Boulders with Irregular Shape in Flash Flood and Debris Flow

The impact force of large boulders carried by flash floods and debris flows is one of the main causes of structural damage. The elastoplastic modification model of the impact force was derived, and it was found that the impact force was significantly affected by large boulders with irregular shapes. However, a large boulder with an irregular shape is often simplified as an isovolumetric sphere or ellipsoid, which may lead to inaccurate calculation of the impact force. In this paper, a method to obtain the irregular shape of a large boulder in the field is proposed by combining field investigation, image processing, and graphic analysis. The irregular shape is described by a nonuniform rational B-spline (NURBS) curve. The curvature radii corresponding to the potential impact contact points on the surface of a large boulder, which can reflect the influence of the irregular shape, are extracted according to the concavity and convexity analysis. The results demonstrate that NURBS curves can describe irregular shapes both conveniently and accurately. The impact force was corrected by the elastic—plastic model, the impact force increased with increasing curvature radius, and the increase ratio of the impact force gradually decreased with increasing velocity. Compared with the isovolumetric sphere model and ellipsoid model, the impact force calculated by the ellipsoid model is closer to the results obtained in this paper. The reduction factor of the impact force is 0.03–0.16, which first increases significantly and then linearly increases with increasing curvature radius. In addition, the reduction factor of the impact force initially exhibits a significant decline with increasing velocity and then gradually stabilises. To simplify parameter selection, we suggest using the maximum curvature radius in the ellipsoid model as the calculation parameter in calculating the impact force of large boulders.