The highway slope failures are triggered by the rainfall, namely, to create the disaster. However, forecasting the failure of highway slop is difficult because of nonlinear time dependency and seasonal effects, which affect the slope displacements. Starting from the artificial neural networks ANNs since the mid-1990s, an effective means is suggested to judge the stability of slope by forecastin...

Soil seepage failure within cofferdams is a dangerous phenomenon that always poses difficulties for designers and builders of excavations in zones with high water levels. When the hydraulic head difference H between upstream downstream sides reaches critical height, soil occurs. Depending on properties, soil-wall interface characteristics, cofferdam design, different modes can be observed: heav...

The field of infrastructure rehabilitation and development requires a better understanding of soil-structure interactions. The interaction behaviour between soil and structures has mostly been investigated through theoretical and/or numerical analysis. This paper presents a series of experiments performed on an intermediate-scale physical model made of an instrumented silo. In contrast to most ...

The invasion of air into porous systems in drying processes is often localized in soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions and granular pastes, and it typically develops in the form of cracks before ordinary drying begins. To investigate such processes, we construct an invasion percolation model on a deformable lattice for cohesionless elastic systems, and with this model we derive the con...

We characterize the force state of shear-loaded granular matter by relating the macroscopic stress to statistical properties of the force network. The purely repulsive nature of the interaction between grains naturally provides an upper bound for the sustainable shear stress, which we analyze using an optimization procedure inspired by the so-called force network ensemble. We establish a relati...