Abstract
The purpose of this research is to investigate the performance and efficiency of reinforced slope in the stability of geocell layers in unsaturated soil conditions. Slope reinforced with geocell acts like a beam in the soil due to the geocell having a height (three-dimensional). Due to its flexural properties, it has moment of inertia as well as bending strength, which reduces the displacement and increases the safety factor of the slope. Taking into consideration unsaturated conditions of soil contributes a lot to making results close to reality. One of the well-known models among elastoplastic models for modeling unsaturated soils is Barcelona Basic Model, which has been added to the FLAC2D software by codification. Changes in thickness, length and number of geocell layers are remarkably effective on slope stability. The results show that the geocell's reinforcing efficiency depends on the number of layers and depth of its placement. As the depth of the geocell's first layer increases, the lateral and vertical side elevation of the upper part of the slope increases with respect to the elevation. Load capacity increases with increasing geocell length. By increasing the length of the geocell layer, the joint strength, the mobilized tensile strength, and the bending moment are increased. At u/H = 0.2, an increase in the bending momentum of about 20% occurs with increasing geocell thickness. In u/H = 1, the increase in bending momentum is 10.4%. In addition, by increasing the thickness of the geocell, the Value of moment of the inertia increases and, as a result, the amount of geocell reinforcement bending moment increases.
Highlights
Different studies have been conducted on reinforced soil slope
To investigate the failure mechanism of geosynthetic-reinforced soil slope and evaluate the design hypothesis and design methods for such walls, numerical and experimental studies have been carried out showing that the failure surface is different from the propagation of failure region; rather, its location is dependent on geometry, strength, and stiffness of reinforcement elements [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The results show that the effective depth of the geocell layer is in the mid-sectional heights of the slope, and the increase in the number of geocell layers has a greater effect on the stability of the slope rather than the increase in geocell length
Summary
Different studies have been conducted on reinforced soil slope. The effect of length and distance of reinforcements on the behavior of reinforced soil slope has been widely examined. The present study has used the Barcelona Basic Model that works elastoplastically and is applied to express the stress-strain of unsaturated soils based on stiffening plasticity. This model was first proposed by Alonso in 1990 at Polytechnic University of Catalonia. The partial volumetric strain, due to the suction decrease by wetting or the suction increase by drying, is found to be purely elastic This model consists of a suction decrease yield curve showing that the effect of suction change on the soil state to reach the yield point is as important as the effect of variation in the net mean stress. The codification method of Barcelona Basic Model is very identical to the modified Cam-Clay Model
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