Although underground works are essential to use underground spaces in urban areas efficiently, various damages caused by constructions have often occurred, making them major social problems. Since 2018, it is stipulated in the Special Act on Underground Safety Management that appropriate construction methods must be used in the design stage to prevent various damage cases. This Special Act includes establishing an area subject to underground safety impact assessment, analysis of ground and geological status, review of effects caused by changes in groundwater, review of ground safety, and establishment of measures to secure underground safety. This study area consists of various strata in order of landfill, sedimentary silt, sedimentary sand, sedimentary gravel, weathering zone, and foundation rock. Also, the slurry wall, a highly rigid underground continuous wall, was chosen as a construction method to consider high water table distribution and minimize the influence of the surroundings in this area. However, ground subsidence occurred on the road nearby in December 2019 due to the inflow of loosening soil to the construction area. Thus, several types of site investigations were conducted to suggest an appropriate analysis method and to find out loosed ground behavior and its area for the subsided site. As a result, new design soil properties were re-calculated, and the reinforcement measures were proposed through analytical verification.
After the Gyeongju earthquake, which was the largest in the history of measuring instruments in Korea in 2016, and after the Pohang earthquake, where the pillars of pallet structures were destroyed in 2017, the seismic design standards for all domestic facilities have been revised and supplemented. In particular, during the investigation of the Pohang Earthquake damage cases, liquefaction damage that occurs mainly in countries with strong earthquakes such as the United States, Japan, and New Zealand was found, so studies are being conducted in depth to improve seismic design standards. In this study, the liquefaction potential assessment in the recently revised seismic design standard for port and harbor was reviewed, and an applicability review was conducted focusing on the newly cited liquefaction potential index (LPI). At this time, by varying the thickness and location of the sandy soil where liquefaction can occur, the LPIs for various cases were calculated and compared. Also, 22 LPI values in the practical port area were compared and reviewed along with performance of the liquefaction assessment based on the site response analysis using the boring-hole data of the actual 22 port sites.
This study aims to investigate the causes and countermeasures for the occurrence of tension cracks in the slope of the rock mass of heavy equipment for road construction. Electric resistivity survey was performed to investigate the expandable tensile crack range. As a result of examining the distribution of soft zones in the rock mass, a low specific resistance zone was found at the bottom of the access road where tensile cracks occurred. It was confirmed that a low resistivity zone was distributed near the top of the excavation slope. Therefore, reinforcements was performed by determining the location of the possible tensile crack as the top of the excavation slope. Two rows of reinforced piles and anchors were proposed as a reinforcement method, and the slope stability analysis showed that the allowable safety factor was satisfied after reinforcements.
In this paper, three-dimensional analysis of the curved levee was performed according to curvature angle, and radius of curvature to investigate the property of seepage. The hydraulic gradients in the curved parts of levees decreased in the outer levee and increased in the inner levee, compared to the two-dimensional analysis. The smaller the curvature angle and the radius of curvature, the larger the change of the hydraulic gradient, compared to the two-dimensional analysis. The effect of curvature radius on the hydraulic gradient was greater than the curvature angle. As a result of evaluating the piping safety factor for the critical hydraulic gradient, the safety factor was increased by 2~5% in the outer levee and decreased by 4~12% in the inner levee, compared to the two-dimensional analysis. Considering this reduction, if the two-dimensional analysis is performed on the curved part of the levee, and if designed the safety factor for piping is 0.1~0.3 greater than allowable FS=2.0, the safety factor of the curved part is slightly reduced, but there is no difficulty in securing stability.
The high-level radioactive waste (HLW) produced from nuclear power plants is disposed in a rock-mass at a depth of hundreds meters below the ground level. Since HLW is very dangerous to human being, it must be disposed of safely by the engineered barrier system (EBS). The EBS consists of a disposal canister, backfill material, buffer material, and so on. When the components of EBS are installed, gaps inevitably exist not only between the rock-mass and buffer material but also between the canister and buffer material. The gap can reduce water-retarding capacity and heat release efficiency of the buffer material, so it is necessary to investigate properties of gap-filling materials and to analyze gap spacing effect. Furthermore, there has been few researches considering domestic disposal system compared to overseas researches. In this reason, this research derived the peak temperature of the bentonite buffer material considering domestic disposal system based on the numerical analysis. The gap between the canister and buffer material had a minor effect on the peak temperature of the bentonite buffer material, but there was 40% difference of the peak temperature of the bentonite buffer material because of the gap existence between the buffer material and rock mass.
Recently, the enzyme-induced carbonate precipitation (EICP) technique has been considered as one of the alternatives to the cement-based soil reinforcing method. However, the problem with the emission of ammonium ion has not been solved. In this study, an experimental study on the EICP without releasing an environmental contaminant (Ze-EICP) is performed using calcium-exchanged zeolite. The results show that the Ze-EICP using calcium-exchanged zeolite reduced the amount of ammonium ions by 96.96% and precipitated almost the same amount of calcium carbonate, compared to the EICP using calcium chloride. In addition, the Ze-EICP shows higher strength improvement rate than the EICP due to densification of zeolite and cementation of calcium carbonate.
Recently, the ground anchor method is commonly applied with nail and rock bolt to secure the stability of slopes and structures in Korea. Among them, permanent anchor which is used for long-term stability should secure bearing capacity and durability during the period of use. However, according to recent studies, phenomenon such as deformation to slope and the reduction of residual tensile load over time have been reported along the long-term behavior of the anchors. These problems of reducing residual tensile load are expected to increase in the future, which will inevitably lead to problems such as increasing maintenance costs. In this study, we identified the factors that affect the tensile load of permanent anchor from a literature study on the domestic and foreign, and investigated the prior studies that analyzed previously conducted load cell monitoring data. Afterwards, using this as basic data, the load cell measurement data collected at the actual site were analyzed to identify the tensile load reduction status of anchors, and the long-term load reduction characteristics were analyzed. Finally, by aggregating the preceding results, proposed a technique to predict the long-term load reduction characteristics of permanent anchors through short-term data to around 100 days after installation.
An individual vacuum consolidation system has gained a popularity for a ground improvement of soft clayey soil. Finite element anaylses have been performed to simulate the individual vacuum consolidation system using a Plaxis 2D. The modelling procedures of the vacuum consolidation system are presented with the results of an unit-cell analysis. In addition, a case study was carried out to assess the applicability of the Plaxis 2D for simulating the consolidation behavior of soft ground subjected to the individual vacuum pressure.
The rock anchorage of a suspension bridge is an outstanding anchorage type from environmental and economical perspective, although it should be applied when the bearing foundation is fresh enough to resist large cable loads. In practice, geotechnical engineers have encountered difficulties in designing the anchorage structure due to the fact that the physical behaviors of rocks against cable loads have not yet been fully proved and its design method was not established yet. In this study, model tests and numerical studies were performed to evaluate the behavior of the rock anchorage system planned under hard rock layers in domestic islands, and results suggest that the shape of asymmetric rock wedges can resist the tension loads with self weight and shear resistance. Additionally, real scale trial tests were carried out to verify the accuracy of an inclined drilling penetrating hard rock layers to install tendon to the bearing plate.
Recently, the demand for three-dimensional (3D) underground maps from the perspective of digital twins and the demand for linkage utilization are increasing. However, the vastness of national geotechnical survey data and the uncertainty in applying geostatistical techniques pose challenges in modeling underground regional geotechnical characteristics. In this study, an optimal learning model based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) was constructed for 3D subsurface lithological and geotechnical classification in Seoul, South Korea. First, the geotechnical layer and 3D spatial coordinates of each borehole dataset in the Seoul area were constructed as a geotechnical database according to a standardized format, and data pre-processing such as correction and normalization of missing values for machine learning was performed. An optimal fitting model was designed through hyperparameter optimization of the MLP model and model performance evaluation, such as precision and accuracy tests. Then, a 3D grid network locally assigning geotechnical layer classification was constructed by applying an MLP-based bet-fitting model for each unit lattice. The constructed 3D geotechnical layer map was evaluated by comparing the results of a geostatistical interpolation technique and the topsoil properties of the geological map.
