A new model of Saint Venant and Savage-Hutter type for gravity driven shallow water flows

We introduce a new model for shallow water flows with non-flat bottom. A prototype is the Saint Venant equation for rivers and coastal areas, which is valid for small slopes. An improved model, due to Savage-Hutter, is valid for small slope variations. We introduce a new model which relaxes all restrictions on the topography. Moreover it satisfies the properties (i) to provide an energy dissipation inequality, (ii) to be an exact hydrostatic solution of Euler equations. The difficulty we overcome here is the normal dependence of the velocity field, that we are able to establish exactly. Applications we have in mind concern, in particular, computational aspects of flows of granular material (for example in debris avalanches) where such models are especially relevant. (C) 2003 Academie des sciences/Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.