Abstract
There were a small amount of obvious offsets at the bearing of bridge piers built on an artificial gentle canal bank terrace and many tensile cracks visible at the surface of the mortar block stones covering the terrace soil in several years following construction. To determine these reasons, a comprehensive site investigation and a wide variety of tests were implemented, which included geophysical tests, in situ tests, laboratory tests, pile integrity detection, and numerical analysis with the finite element method (FEM). The results revealed that the soil of the low‐angle slope was the potentially low‐expansive clay soil. The reduction in soil shear strength deriving from seasonal wet‐dry cycles and river‐level variations led to the instability and failure of the low‐angle low‐expansive soil slope, which triggered the collapses of the soil slope and lots of fractures in the piles of the bridge foundation. The typical characteristics of the instability and failure of the low‐angle low‐expansive soil slope were tractional detachment and slow sliding.
Highlights
Expansive soil failure events are not as dramatic as earthquakes or hurricanes. e failure soil occurs more slowly than those in other disasters, and the damage may not be concentrated in a small location but instead spread over wide areas
It was observed in the seventh year after its construction that a small amount of offset had occurred at the bearing of bridge piers #1∼#4 built on the canal slope, and there were many tensile cracks visible at the surface of the stone masonry covering above the slope
Index properties of the slope soil, including the water content (WC), plastic limit (PL), plasticity index (PI), and liquid limit (LL), determined from the laboratory tests of the soil samples are shown in Table 2 and Figure 4
Summary
Received 1 January 2020; Revised 14 February 2020; Accepted 20 April 2020; Published 14 May 2020. Ere were a small amount of obvious offsets at the bearing of bridge piers built on an artificial gentle canal bank terrace and many tensile cracks visible at the surface of the mortar block stones covering the terrace soil in several years following construction. To determine these reasons, a comprehensive site investigation and a wide variety of tests were implemented, which included geophysical tests, in situ tests, laboratory tests, pile integrity detection, and numerical analysis with the finite element method (FEM). E typical characteristics of the instability and failure of the low-angle low-expansive soil slope were tractional detachment and slow sliding
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