Analysis of a railway embankment landslide induced by the Wenchuan earthquake, China

Abstract

An embankment slope in Baoji-Chengdu railway collapsed during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. This paper presents the local geological and environmental conditions of the embankment landslide, and embankment material properties were determined through field investigations and laboratory tests on reconstituted fill samples. A series of static and pseudo-static analyses were performed to acquire a quantitative assessment of the embankment stability and critical surfaces, and the failure mode of the embankment was investigated through fully coupled nonlinear dynamic analyses. The results show that the failure surface computed by the limit equilibrium method was deeper than observed, and the failure surface configuration obtained by fully coupled dynamic response analysis agreed well with the post-failure observations; however, the computed displacement was a bit large than those observed.