Depth of trenchs without propping - up in building underground works on unsaturated soils by open –method

Abstract

This article presents a method to determine the depth of trench without propping up in building underground works – by open method. It is known that, almost previous methods have solved this problem on saturated or unsaturated soils with constant cohesive forces or linear depth (from ground to underground water level). In this paper, we focus on the variation of the cohesive forces by the non-linear function. Using the software Maple and theories of soil mechanics, we propose a formula that can find out the depth of trench. Some numerical results are presented.