Modeling the impact of soil cohesiveness on embankment stability under rapid drawdown

Abstract

For embankment slope stability, soil cohesivity is one of the most important shear strength parameters. The effect of cohesiveness on the slope stability of a homogeneous embankment dam under rapid drawdown loading conditions was examined in this study. With the use of numerical modeling in GeoStudio, different situations were explored based on cohesiveness (0 kN/m2, 5 kN/m2, 10 kN/m2, and 15 kN/m2) under a 1 m per day drawdown rate. The factor of safety value obtained from the long-term steady-state condition under 15 kN/m2 cohesion was equivalent to a 116.8% increase from the one obtained under 0 kN/m2 cohesion. The factor of safety values obtained after subjecting the embankment to different soil cohesion levels yielded a p-value of 1.91 x 10-41, according to the Analysis of Variance. The calculated p-value (alpha value) is less than 0.05, suggesting that the differences between the examined cohesiveness values based on the list of the factor of safety values are statistically significant. The findings derived in this study show that it is significant to capture the effect of material characteristics during the design phase of an embankment dam.