The aim of this project is to investigate the stability of cut slopes in stiff clay. The findings are subsequently applied to model stabilisation with piles, used to remediate failure of existing slopes and stabilise potentially unstable slopes created by widening transport corridors. Stiff clay is a strain softening material, meaning that soil strength reduces as the material is strained, for example in the formation of a slip surface. In an excavated slope this can lead to a progressive, brittle slope failure. Simulation of strain softening behaviour is therefore an important aspect to model. The interaction of piles and stiff clay cut slopes is investigated using the Imperial College Geotechnics section's finite element program ICFEP. In designing a suitable layout of the finite element mesh, preliminary analyses found the two existing local strain softening models to be very dependent on the size and arrangement of elements. To mitigate this shortcoming, a nonlocal strain softening model was implemented in ICFEP. This model controls the development of strain by relating the surrounding strains to the calculation of strain at that point, using a weighting function. Three variations of the nonlocal formulation are evaluated in terms of their mesh dependence. A parametric study with simple shear and biaxial compression analyses evaluated the new parameters required by the nonlocal strain softening model. The nonlocal results demonstrated very low mesh dependence and a clear improvement on the local strain softening models. In order to examine the mesh dependence of the new model in a boundary value problem compared to the local strain softening approach, excavated slope analyses without piles were first performed. The slope was modelled in plane strain with coupled consolidation. These analyses also investigated other factors such as the impact of adopting a small strain stiffness material model on the development of the failure mechanism and the impact of the spatial variation of permeability on the time to failure. The final set of analyses constructed vertical stabilisation piles in the excavated slope, represented as either solid elements or one dimensional beam elements. The development of various failure mechanisms for stiff clay cuttings was found to be dependent on pile location, pile diameter and pile length. This project provides an insight into the constitutive model and boundary conditions required to study stabilisation piles in a stiff clay cutting. The nonlocal model performed very well to reduce mesh dependence, confirming the biaxial compression results. However, the use of coupled consolidation was found to cause further mesh dependence of the results.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:689085 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Summersgill, Freya |
| Contributors | Kontoe, Stavroula ; Potts, David |
| Publisher | Imperial College London |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/34567 |
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