The US and many parts around the world have experienced prolonged periods of heavy rainfall, severe floods, and droughts over the past 50 years. This study investigates the impacts of extreme hydrological events such as heavy rainfall and flood on the settlement behavior of continuous footing installed in unsaturated soil using a coupled Geotechnical-Hydrological finite element software, PLAXIS 2D. Initially, the effect of different degrees of saturation on the settlement behavior of the continuous footing of widths 1.5 m, 3.0 m, and 4.5 m was analyzed by applying a mechanical load. Then the settlement behavior of the footing was analyzed by applying heavy rainfall of intensity 102 mm/day for six days. Finally, the settlement behavior of the footing was analyzed by applying a flood head of 2.5 meters for seven days. The results indicated that the wetting front movement during heavy rainfall and flooding led to the weakening of soil strength and stiffness and induced additional settlements. The additional settlement induced by the flood was significantly higher than the heavy rainfall. The differential settlement was higher when the rainfall was applied on one side of the footing. The rebound of the elastic settlement was uniquely noticed when the flood head receded with time. The results indicated that not all the settlements were induced by the soil saturation but also due to the hydrostatic loading due to the flood head. The settlements induced by the flooding exceeded the allowable settlement of 25 mm, resulting in failure. These additional settlements caused by heavy rainfall and flood will lead to poor serviceability of the structures and cause the failure of the footing.
Unsaturated soil is a three-phase medium with three interfaces, and the mathematical equations that represent its behavior must be developed in a fully coupled manner for accurately predicting its hydromechanical behavior. In this paper, a set of fully coupled governing equations was developed for the dynamics of unsaturated soil, considering the interaction among the bulk phases and interfaces. In addition to implementing the complete governing equations, a simplified formulation was developed for practical applications. The derivation of the finite element formulation considering all the terms in the partial differential equations resulted in a formulation called complete formulation and was solved for the first time in this paper. Another formulation called reduced formulation was derived by neglecting the relative accelerations and velocities of water and air in the governing equations. In addition, small and large deformation theories were developed and implemented for both formulations. To show the applicability of the proposed models, the dynamic behavior of an unsaturated soil embankment was simulated using both small and large deformation formulations by applying minor and severe earthquakes. The reduced formulation was found to be computationally efficient and numerically stable. The smaller displacements predicted by large deformation theories show that the results are consistent with the expected behavior. Large deformation theories are considered suitable when the geotechnical system undergoes large deformation and may lead to accurate prediction.
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