Investigating Stabilized Excavations Using Soil Nailing Method in Urban Context

There are various methods for stabilizing excavations in urban areas which one of them is the nailing method. Designing a nailing system and analyzing the performance of excavations is done by various software applications. One of these computer programs is PAXIS software which run based on the finite element method (FEM). In the present study, a numerical analysis of the performance of the excavations was investigated under different soil model and the most appropriate model was introduced. In addition, the excavation performance was evaluated based on certain designing conditions affected by the soil resistance specifications (cohesion and internal friction angle) and surcharge. The results indicated that, using an appropriate behavioral model which contains increasing soil stiffness with depth, shows results close to reality. They also indicated that under certain designing conditions, the lateral deformation of the soil nail wall and ground settlement decrease as soil resistance specifications increase.