A trial embankment 6 m high was built on peat in the Netherlands, and brought to failure. The aim was to test whether innovative sensor technology could detect incipient failure in time. However, the data generated also made it possible to conduct a geotechnical assessment of stability. The paper discusses the relation between the parameters derived from laboratory tests, field measurements and behaviour observed in the field. Problems encountered in the standard triaxial testing of peat samples are discussed, as the samples tend to fail in tension. A trial pit through the failed embankment showed that there were wide tension cracks in the peat layer, indicating that the peat layer failed in tension, at least locally. However, horizontal movement dominates the overall failure mechanism. As an alternative to triaxial testing, direct simple shear (DSS) testing for the assessment of peat parameters is considered. The results of the DSS tests correspond well with field measurements and the back-analysis of the failure.
Real-time monitoring of civil infrastructure provides valuable information to assess the health and condition of the associated systems. This paper presents the recently developed shape acceleration array (SAA) and local system identification (SI) technique, which constitute a major step toward long-term effective health monitoring and analysis of soil and soil-structure systems. The SAA is based on triaxial micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors to measure in situ deformation (angles relative to gravity) and dynamic accelerations up to a depth of one hundred meters. This paper provides an assessment of this array's performance for geotechnical instrumentation applications by reviewing the recorded field data from a bridge replacement site and a full-scale levee test facility. The SI technique capitalizes on the abundance of static and dynamic measurements from the SAA. The geotechnical properties and constitutive response of soil contained within a locally instrumented zone are analyzed and identified independently of adjacent soil strata.
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