Optimization analysis of the factors affecting the soil arching effect between landslide stabilizing piles

Abstract

AbstractTo enhance the effective control of landslides, it is important for practitioners to consider the effectiveness of soil arching. The aim of this paper is to analyze the order of importance of the factors that affect the soil arching effect and determine their optimal combination for the design of landslide stabilizing piles. First a plane‐strain finite element model was established to investigate the soil arching effect. Then, the orthogonal test method was used to perform a multilevel analysis. The results show that for one row of piles, the top three factors are uniform load, pile spacing, and interfacial strength parameters, while for two rows of piles, the top three are pile spacing, Poisson's ratio, and row spacing. At last, the optimal combination is determined. The proposed method represents a new and effective approach to determine the major and minor factors and their optimal combination, which can reduce costs and contribute to the control of landslides.Summary for Managers It is efficiency to use orthogonal method. The orthogonal test is used to reduce the number of trials in the case of a variety of factors and a variety of levels of tests. This method requires fewer experiments to achieve the same results as comprehensive experiments. The PLAXIS finite element software is used to simulate the arching effect in soil mass. PLAXIS is a finite element calculation program for the analysis of deformation and stability of geotechnical engineering. The importance order is determined by computing the range value, and the optimal combination is determined by comparing the sum of all combinations’ index value.