Abstract
This study investigates the effectiveness of vegetation reinforcement on the stability of a slope with red-bed soft rock in a slope along the Xining-Chengdu railway, China. Four kinds of vegetation were considered to reinforce the soil and the slope. The rooted soil parameters were determined based on the laboratory tests. A numerical model was developed based on the actual geometry and soil layer distributions. The soils were modeled as elastic perfectly plastic materials and the vegetation reinforcement was represented as addition cohesion of a series of subsoil layers within a given depth. The effectiveness of vegetation on slope reinforcement under both dry and rainfall conditions was investigated regarding this case. The potential failure surface and corresponding factor of safety of the red-bed soft rock slope for those different conditions were analyzed and compared. It has been found that the addition of vegetation increased the safety of slope stability whether the slope is under a dry condition or a rainfall condition, while the increasing proportion of factor of safety due to vegetation reinforcement for this case is very limited. The results and findings in this study are still significant for the practitioner to evaluate the reasonability of vegetation reinforcement.
Highlights
Slope stability is one of the very traditional but significant issues related to geotechnical engineering, embankment engineering, dam engineering and landfill engineering [1,2,3,4,5,6]
This paper aims at the effectiveness of vegetation reinforcement of the actual slope under both dry and rainfall conditions
The reinforcement of vegetation roots was expressed by the additional cohesion of soils in shallow soil layers
Summary
Slope stability is one of the very traditional but significant issues related to geotechnical engineering, embankment engineering, dam engineering and landfill engineering [1,2,3,4,5,6]. In the past two decades, investigations on the effects of vegetation on slope stability have been widely conducted [12,29,30,31,32,33,34]. Among these studies, some of the studies focus on how the soil properties changed due to the existence of vegetation roots. Et al [47] investigated the slope stability along a road by incorporating the effect of five types of plant roots through numerical modeling technique, and it was found that the factor of safety increased from 22–34% when the slope was reinforced with plant roots
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