Effects of reinforcements on a sandpile model

Abstract

Real world landslide systems usually contain reinforcements in the form of trees and man-made structures. We probe the effects of placing reinforcements in the sandpile model by adding sinks or avalanche immune cells. We increase the total number of randomly positioned sinks and illustrate that the maximum avalanche size decreases exponentially as the total number of sinks increases. We investigate the behavior of the sandpile for the same number of sinks but with different configurations and show that the maximum avalanche size distribution is robust for any sink configuration.