Study on the influence of spatial variability of soil strength parameters on reliability and slip surfaces of cofferdam slope reinforced by geosynthetic reinforcement

Abstract

How to guarantee the stability of the cofferdam slope during and after construction is a difficult problem. In this article, a practical procedure is developed to implement probabilistic stability analysis for reinforced slope considering the spatial variability of soil strength. In the proposed procedure, the improved random limit equilibrium method is adopted to calculate the safety factor and particle swarm optimization is adopted to search critical sliding surface of slope. The influence of different reinforcement positions, lengths, and number of layers on the reliability of reinforced slope and critical sliding surface is studied. The results show the variability of soil, the length, location, and the number of layers of geosynthetics are important factors affecting probability of failure (Pf ) of reinforced slope. The location and the number of layers of geosynthetic reinforcement play an important role in the statistical characteristics of FOS and slip mass volume. The reinforcement length has a greater impact on the safety factor.