• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
• /
• v.28 no.7
• /
• pp.5-16
• /
• 2012

Soil-nailing is the most popular method of reinforcing for slope stability. In general, two factors are considered as failure modes during the soil-nailing design stages: pullout failure mode and shear failure mode that will occur on the most probable failure plane. In many cases, however, shallow failure can also occur when the ground near the slope face is swept away by the horizontal stress release during the staged top-down excavation. In this paper, an optimized soil-nailing design methodology is proposed by considering the three failure modes mentioned above: pullout failure; shear failure; and shallow failure. The variables to be optimized include the bonded length and number of soil-nailings, and the confining pressure that should be applied at the slope face. The procedure to obtain the optimized design variables is as follows: at first, optimization of soil-nailings, i.e. bonded length and number, against pullout and shear failure modes; and then, optimization of confining pressure at each excavation stage that is needed to prevent shallow failure. Since the two processes are linked with each other, they are repeated until the optimized design variables can be obtained satisfying all the constrained design requirements in both of the two processes.