Study on soil arching effects of stabilizing piles using numerical methods

The soil arching effects is the main mechanism of the stabilizing piles enhancing the stability of the landslides, in which the interslice forces transmitted to the soil arching and the piles. This paper presents FEM analysis and DDA analysis studying on the soil arching effects of stabilizing piles in landslides. The FEM analysis technique builds simplified models of soil arching effects basing on analyzing the landslide characteristics. Then the paper gave a detailed analysis about the characteristics of soil arching effects and the influence of different pile interval and pile width on soil arching effects. The results shown that the soil arching effects do exist and the height of soil arching becomes larger when the pile interval is larger; the soil arching height does not change when the pile width increases, while the shape of soil arching changes. Then a method that it could compute the influence of different slope angles on soil arching effect was proposed using the DDA analysis techniques. The results shown that the method can resolve the problem, which simulates the soil arching effect of different slope angles using two dimension DDA model. Besides, the DDA model could simulate the soil arching effects and had a good simulation effect.