Strength parameter selection framework for evaluating the design life of clay cut slopes

TL;DR: A novel method determines soil-water retention curves (SWRCs) of compacted active clays through a simple, semi-empirical model combining SWRC branches and soil shrink-swell curves, enabling accurate modeling of clay deterioration due to weather cycles.

Abstract: Abstract Deteriorating infrastructure slopes have significant implications for infrastructure management, as their performance and long-term behaviour can impact travel, costs, safety, and operational efficiency. Understanding the long-term behaviour and performance of geotechnical assets is crucial for effective asset management and proactive maintenance. This systematic review examines existing research on deterioration models to identify methodologies, monitoring techniques, and data collection approaches employed to analyse the behaviour of geotechnical assets over time. The review emphasizes the importance of understanding asset deterioration mechanisms, particularly those influenced by weathering, and their impact on the overall performance and long-term behaviour of geotechnical assets. By consolidating knowledge from the scientific literature, this study highlights the limited availability of comprehensive deterioration models for earthwork slopes but identifies a growing interest in studying factors and mechanisms that contribute to understanding long-term asset behaviour. The review underscores the significance of monitoring, instrumentation, and data collection to enhance our understanding of geotechnical asset deterioration and improve predictive capabilities. Additionally, a proposed framework is introduced for long-term analysis of geotechnical assets, advocating combining lab and field tests for precise soil characterization and developing deterioration models. This systematic review deepens the understanding of asset deterioration mechanisms and aids in decision-making for infrastructure resilience.

TL;DR: In this paper, the three primary sources of geotechnical uncertainties are inherent variability, measurem, and measurem uncertainties, and the three main sources of variability are measurem and inherent variability.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the probability of failure of a cohesive slope using both simple and more advanced probabilistic analysis tools, and concluded that simplified probabilism, in which spatial variability is ignored by assuming perfect correlation, can lead to unconservative estimates of the failure probability.