Progressive increase in population causing land scarcity, which is forcing construction industry to build multistory buildings having underground basements. Normally, basements are constructed for parking facility. This research work evaluates important factors which have caused the collapse of pile-anchor system at under construction five star hotel. 21 m deep excavation is carried out, to have five basements, after installation of 600 mm diameter cast in-situ contiguous concrete piles at plot periphery. To retain piles and backfill, soil anchors are installed as pit excavation is proceeded. Before collapse, anchors are designed by federal highway administration procedure and four anchor rows are installed with three strands per anchor in first row and four in remaining. However, after collapse, system is modeled and analyzed in plaxis using mohr-coulomb method. It is investigated that in-appropriate evaluation of soil properties, additional surcharge loads, lesser number of strands per anchor, shorter grouted body length and shorter pile embedment depth caused large deformations to occur which governed the collapse of east side pile wall. To resume work, old anchors are assumed to be standing at one factor of safety and then system is analyzed using finite element approach. Finally, it is concluded to use four strands per anchor in first new row and five strands in remaining three with increase in grouted and un-grouted body lengths.

The main aim of this study is to introduce optimal design of homogeneous earth dams with oblique and horizontal drains based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) incorporating weighted least squares support vector machine (WLS-SVM). To achieve this purpose, the upstream and downstream slopes of earth dam, the length of oblique and horizontal drains and angle among the drains are considered as the design variables in the optimization problem of homogeneous earth dams. Furthermore, the seepage through dam body and the weight of dam as objective functions are minimized in the optimization process simultaneously. In the optimization procedure, the stability coefficient of the upstream and downstream slopes and the seepage through dam body as the hydraulic responses of homogeneous earth dam are required. Hence, the hydraulic responses are predicted using WLS-SVM approach. The optimal results of illustrative examples demonstrate the efficiency and computational advantages of PSO with WLS-SVM in the optimal design of homogeneous earth dams with drains.

The aim of the present work was the study of instability in a loose sand from Les Dunes beach in Ain Beninan, Algeria, where the Boumerdes earthquake occurred in 2003. This earthquake caused significant structural damages and claimed the lives of many people. Damages caused to infrastructures were strongly related to phenomena of liquefaction. The study was based on the results of two drained and six undrained triaxial tests over a local sand collected in a region where liquefaction occurred. All the tests hereby analyzed followed compression stress-paths in monotonic conditions and the specimens were isotropically consolidated, since the objective was to study the instability due to static loading as part of a more general project, which also included cyclic studies. The instability was modeled with the second-order work increment criterion. The definition of the instability line for Les Dunes sand and its relation with yield surfaces allowed the identification of the region of potential instability and helped in the evaluation of the susceptibility of soils to liquefy under undrained conditions and its modeling. The dilatancy rate was studied in the points where instability began. Some mixed tests were also simulated, starting with drained conditions and then changing to undrained conditions at different time steps.

It is well known that the quality of sample significantly determines the accuracy of soil parameters for laboratory testing. Although sampling disturbance has been studied over the last few decades, the theoretical investigation of soil disturbance due to sampling penetration has been rarely reported. In this paper, an analytical solution for estimating the soil disturbance due to sampling penetration was presented using cavity expansion method. Analytical results in several cases reveal that the soil at different location along the sample centerline experiences distinct phases of strain during the process of sampling penetration. The magnitude of induced strain is dependent on the position of the soil element within the sampler and the sampler geometry expressed as diameter-thickness ratio D/t and length-diameter ratio L/D. Effects of sampler features on soil disturbance were also studied. It is found that the induced maximum strain decreases exponentially with increasing diameter-thickness ratio, indicating that the sampling disturbance will reduce with increasing diameter or decreasing wall thickness of sampler. It is also found that a large length-diameter ratio does not necessarily reduce the disturbance. An optimal length-diameter ratio is suggested for the further design of improved sampler in this study.

Reinforcing soils with the geosynthetics have been shown to be an effective method for improving the uplift capacity of granular soils. The pull-out resistance of the reinforcing elements is one of the most notable factors in increasing the uplift capacity. In this paper, a new reinforcing element including the elements (anchors) attached to the ordinary geogrid for increasing the pull-out resistance of the reinforcement, is used. Thus, the reinforcement consists of the geogrid and anchors with the cylindrical plastic elements attached to it, namely grid-anchors. A three-dimensional numerical study, employing the commercial finite difference software FLAC-3D, was performed to investigate the uplift capacity of the pipelines buried in sand reinforced with this system. The models were used to investigate the effect of the pipe diameter, burial depth, soil density, number of the reinforcement layers, width of the reinforcement layer, and the stiffness of geogrid and anchors on the uplift resistance of the sandy soils. The outcomes reveal that, due to a developed longer failure surface, inclusion of grid-anchor system in a soil deposit outstandingly increases the uplift capacity. Compared to the multilayer reinforcement, the single layer reinforcement was more effective in enhancing the uplift capacity. Moreover, the efficiency of the reinforcement layer inclusion for uplift resistance in loose sand is higher than dense sand. Besides, the efficiency of reinforcement layer inclusion for uplift resistance in lower embedment ratios is higher. In addition, by increasing the pipe diameter, the efficiency of the reinforcement layer inclusion will be lower. Results demonstrate that, for the pipes with an outer diameter of 50 mm, the grid-anchor system of reinforcing can increase the uplift capacity 2.18 times greater than that for an ordinary geogrid and 3.20 times greater than that for non-reinforced sand.

Due to the extension of communication ways (metro, highways, railways), hence, to improve traffic flow imposes often the difficult crossing that generally drive to the construction of underground works (tunnel, water conveyance tunnel...) plays a major role in the redevelopment of urban areas. This study is focused on the assessment of the interaction response of parallel tunnels, so this study uses the results from the simulation of two tunnels to illustrate a few observations that may aid in practical designs. In this article, simultaneous drilling of highway's twin tunnels is simulated by means of Finite Element Method (FEM) implemented in Plaxis program. So the treated subject appears in a setting of geotechnical where one can be to construct several tunnels sometimes in a ground of weak mechanical characteristics. The objective of this study is to simulate numerically the interaction effects caused by construction of two parallels tunnels. This is an important factor in the study of the total answer of the problem interaction between parallels underground works. The importance of the effects transmitted is function of several parameters as the type of the works, and the mechanical characteristics (tunnel size, depth, and the relative position between two tunnels, lining thickness...). This article describes numerical analyses of two parallels tunnels interaction. This study will be applied to a real case of a section tunnel T4 of the highway East-West (Algeria); the study presented below comprises a series of numerical simulations of two tunnels using the computer program Plaxis which is used in the analyses is based on Finite Element Method.

Characterization of discontinuous media is an endeavor that poses great challenge to engineers in practice. Since the inherent defects in cracked domains can substantially influence material resistance and govern its behavior, a lot of work is dedicated to efficiently model such effects. In order to overcome difficulties of material instability problems, one needs to comprehensively represent the geometry of cracks along with their impact on the mechanical properties of the intact material. In the present study, stress-strain results from laboratory experiments on Inada granite was used to derive crack tensor as a tool for the evaluation of fractured domain stability. It was found that the formulations proposed earlier could satisfactorily be employed to attain crack tensor via the invariants of which judgment on cracks population and induced anisotropy is possible. The earlier criteria based on crack tensor analyses were reviewed and compared to the results of the current study. It is concluded that the geometrical parameters calculated using mechanical properties could confidently be used to judge the anisotropy as well as strength of the cracked domain.

The mechanical behavior of soil and soil-rock mixture is investigated via the discrete element method. A non-overlapping combination method of spheres is used to model convex polyhedron rock blocks of soil-rock mixture in the DEM simulations. The meso-mechanical parameters of soil and soil-rock interface in DEM simulations are obtained from the in-situ tests. Based on the Voronoi cell, a method representing volumtric strain of the sample at the particle scale is proposed. The numerical results indicate that the particle rotation, occlusion, dilatation and self-organizing force chains are a remarkable phenomena of the localization band for the soil and soil-rock mixture samples. The localization band in a soil-rock mixture is wider than that in the soil sample. The current research shows that the 3D discrete element method can effectively simulate the mechanical behavior of soil and soil-rock mixture.