A Hydro-mechanical Coupled Analysis of an Unsaturated River Embankment due to Seepage Flow

摘要

In this paper, a soil-water coupled elasto-plastic finite element analysis is applied to the problem of seepage flow by incorporating unsaturated seepage characteristics and assuming the pore air pressure in the unsaturated soil region to be atmospheric pressure. It is shown that the proposed soil deformation-seepage flow coupled analysis method is applicable to safety investigations of river embankments and that the existing evaluation criterion for the seepage failure of river embankments is not always on the safe side.