Wall movement during dewatering inside a diaphragm wall before soil excavation

Abstract

Significant movement of in-situ retaining walls is usually assumed to begin with bulk excavation. However, an increasing number of case studies show that lowering the pore water pressures inside a diaphragm wall-type basement enclosure prior to bulk excavation can cause wall movements in the order of some centimeters. This paper describes the results of a laboratory-scale experiment carried out to explore mechanisms of in situ retaining wall movement associated with dewatering inside the enclosure prior to bulk excavation. Dewatering reduces the pore water pressures inside the enclosure more than outside, resulting in the wall moving as an unpropped cantilever supported only by the soil. Lateral effective stresses in the shallow soil behind the wall are reduced, while lateral effective stresses in front of the wall increase. Although the associated lateral movement was small in the laboratory experiment, the movement could be proportionately larger in the field with a less stiff soil and a potentially greater dewatered depth. The implementation of a staged dewatering system, coupled with the potential for phased excavation and propping strategies, can effectively mitigate dewatering-induced wall and soil movements. This approach allows for enhanced stiffness of the wall support system, which can be dynamically adjusted based on real-time displacement monitoring data when necessary.

Keywords

Deep excavation / Dewatering / Diaphragm wall deflection / Groundwater control / Laboratory experiment

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Chao-Feng Zeng: Writing - original draft, Methodology. William Powrie: Writing - review & editing. Chang-Jie Xu: Investigation. Xiu-Li Xue: Formal analysis, Data curation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52478342 and 52238009), the Science and Technology Innovation Program of Hunan Province (Grant No. 2022RC1172), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province (Grant No. 20223BBG71018). Finally, we deeply appreciate the warm and efficient work of editors and reviewers.

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