Sinkhole occurrences due to underground water mains operations have piqued people’s curiosity. Most research works were in relation to geophysical practices to discover the subsurface cavity. Very few works can be found in relation to the investigation of soil stability due to underground cavity shapes. The actual shape of an underground cavity and its transformation is difficult to predict, though the sinkhole failures are mostly circular in shape on the ground surface. This study explores the three-dimensional collapse stability of three distinct idealized cavity geometries, namely the circular, semi-spherical, and spherical cavities. For an active failure, dimensionless parameters are used to investigate the combined impacts of soil cover, surcharge pressure, soil weight, and internal pressure using advanced finite element limit analysis. Numerical results are compared with the two-dimensional axisymmetric results, and design charts presented to cover a wide range of design parameters for practical applications.
Road subsidence and sinkhole failures due to shallow cavities formed by defective water main have increased in recent decades and become one of the important research topics in geotechnical engineering. The present paper numerically studies the stability and its associated failure mechanism of ellipse-shaped cavity above defective water mains using the finite element limit analysis technique. For a wide range of geometrical parameters, the pressure ratio method is used to formulate the stability solutions in both blowout and collapse scenarios. Even though there is no published solution for elliptical cavities under blowout failure conditions, the obtained numerical results are compared with available circular solutions. Several conclusions are drawn based on the failure mechanism study of the various ellipse shape transformations in this study, whilst design charts and equations proposed for practical uses.
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