Assessment of cohesive soil landslide driving forces exerted on piles considering soil arching effects

Abstract

As known, the reinforcement effect of piles significantly relies on the precise assessment of cohesive soil landslide driving forces exerted on piles. However, the existing methods for estimating the cohesive soil landslide driving forces have scarcely considered the soil arching effects. Generally, this leads to prohibitively conservative approaches for pile stabilization. In this study, according to the Mohr Coulomb theory and the Ito plastic theory, a theoretical analysis method for quantitatively clarifying the distribution of cohesive soil landslide driving forces along piles is presented in detail, considering the vertical and horizontal soil arching effects between two adjacent piles in a pile row above the sliding surface. Centrifuge model test and full scale test of a pile-reinforced cohesive soil slope are introduced for verifying the proposed method, respectively. Compared with previous methods, the proposed method can prospectively produce results in better agreement with the test results. Ultimately, parametric analyses are conducted to investigate the effect of influencing parameters on the landslide driving forces, and the outcomes indicate a rational pile spacing and a small slope angle should be essentially considered for stabilizing a cohesive soil landslide effectively.