Deterioration of an infrastructure cutting subjected to climate change
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RESEARCH PAPER
Deterioration of an infrastructure cutting subjected to climate change M. Rouainia1 • P. Helm1 • O. Davies1 • S. Glendinning1 Received: 12 October 2018 / Accepted: 10 April 2020 The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Observations show that many soils in linear geotechnical infrastructure including embankments and cuttings undergo seasonal volume changes, and different studies confirm that this is due to cycles in climatic and hydrological conditions. These cycles can give rise to progressive failure of the soil mass, which in turn may lead to deterioration of performance and ultimately slope failure. It is expected that the magnitude of the seasonal cycles of pore pressure will be increased by more extreme and more frequent events of wet and dry periods predicted by future climate scenarios. In this paper, numerical modelling has been undertaken to simulate a continuous time series pore water pressure within a representative cutting in London Clay. The approach uses synthetic control and future climate scenarios from a weather generator to investigate the potential impacts of climate change on cutting stability. Surface pore water pressures are obtained by a hydrological model, which are then applied to a coupled fluid-mechanical model. These models are able to capture the significant soil–vegetation–atmospheric interaction processes allowing the induced unsaturated hydro-mechanical response to be investigated. The chosen hydraulic conductivity variables in the model are shown to affect the total magnitude of pore pressure fluctuation and hence the rate of progressive failure. The results demonstrate for the first time that higher total magnitude of annual variation in pore pressures caused by future climate scenarios can have a significant effect on deformations in cuttings. This in turn leads to increased rates of deterioration and reduces time to failure. Keywords Clays Failure Numerical modelling Pore pressures Slopes Suction Vegetation
1 Introduction There is now agreement within the scientific community that the climate is changing and those changes have been quantified for a number of scenarios within the UK [36, 38]. Engineers must assess how that change will affect infrastructure in order to prepare to minimise disruption [41] and financial risk [18]. Natural slopes and infrastructure cuttings constructed within a clay material are susceptible to seasonal changes in pore water pressures during infiltration. These changes have been continuously monitored by a number of authors [14, 34, 56, 61, 67, 69]. These changes in pore pressures over time can be correlated with variable meteorological conditions [62, 63]. In turn, understanding the effect of these meteorological conditions and vegetation-driven processes such as suction generation, & M. Rouainia [email protected] 1
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
shrink-swell and desiccation cracking along with the potential implications of climate variability on stability are identif
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