ESR7 Bar­bara Switala

Re­search pro­ject de­scrip­tion

An­alysis of Slope Stabiliza­tion by Soil Bi­oen­gineer­ing Met­hods

Fel­low: ESR7: Bar­bara Maria Switala

Super­visor: Prof. Dr. Ing. Wei Wu

In­stitu­tion: De­part­ment of Civil En­gineer­ing and Natur­al Hazards, Uni­vers­ity of Natur­al Re­sour­ces and Life Sci­ences, Vien­na

Soil bi­oen­gineer­ing met­hods of slope stabiliza­tion have been well known since ages and com­mon­ly used worldwide. De­spite of this fact, re­search on this topic is re­lative­ly re­cent. Moreov­er, usual­ly out­dated or too sim­ple un­coup­led models are used in the numer­ical cal­cula­tions.

Bi­oen­gineer­ing is an im­por­tant and multi­dis­ciplina­ry branch of en­gineer­ing, es­pecial­ly nowadays, when pro-ecological and economical­ly attrac­tive sol­u­tions are more and more de­sir­able.

The aim of this pro­ject is to create a three di­men­sion­al numer­ical model which co­u­ples both mech­an­ical and hy­drolog­ical fac­tors, aris­ing from the pre­s­ence of plants on the slope and pro­tect­ing the sur­face layer from the oc­curr­ence of shal­low landslides.

Ad­ditional­ly the pro­ject will en­rich the cur­rent know­ledge about how roots re­in­force the soil mass and how it in­flu­ences the in­crease of shear strength. This has to be com­bined with hy­drolog­ical ef­fects caused by evapot­ranspira­tion: modified soil mois­ture re­gime, dis­sipa­tion of ex­cess pore pre­ssure and es­tablis­hed mat­ric suc­tion.

As an input to the model, the approp­riate slope geomet­ry and soil pro­pert­ies have to be chos­en. It is also im­por­tant to con­sid­er dif­ferent types of plants and roots pro­pert­ies, as well as dif­ferent levels of the ground water table. To as­sess the ef­fect of evapot­ranspira­tion it is neces­sa­ry to know the geog­raph­ical loc­aliza­tion of the slope and climatolog­ical data from the chos­en re­g­ion. This is strict­ly con­nec­ted with work of other MuMoLaDe fel­lows, who in­ves­tigate rain­fall in­duced slope failures in both numer­ical and ex­periment­al way, which is es­senti­al also for this pro­ject. Moreov­er, it opens a door to fu­ture co­opera­tion, es­pecial­ly with ESR 1, ESR 4 and ESR 13, in terms of choos­ing approp­riate data and shear­ing ideas and ob­tained re­sults.

Fig. 1 Over­view of the numer­ical and an­alyt­ical model