Analytical solution for slope instability assessment considering impact of confined aquifer

An analytical approach was presented for estimating the factor of safety(FS) for slope failure, with consideration of the impact of a confined aquifer. An upward-moving wetting front from the confined water was assumed and the pore water pressure distribution was then estimated and used to obtain the analytical expression of FS. Then, the validation of the theoretical analysis was applied based on an actual case in Hong Kong. It is shown that the presence of a confined aquifer leads to a lower FS value, and the impact rate of hydrostatic pressure on FS increases as the confined water pressure increases, approaching to a maximum value determined by the ratio of water density to saturated soil density. It is also presented that the contribution of hydrostatic pressure and hydrodynamic pressure to the slope stability vary with the confined aquifer pressure.

Relationship between the Earth tidal factor and phase lag of groundwater levels in confined aquifers and the Wenchuan M_s8.0 earthquake of 2008

This work focuses on variations of the Earth tidal factor and phase lag derived from groundwater observations before and after major earthquakes.It is based on an analysis of the data from four observational wells at boundaries between distinct active blocks of China mainland.These wells are also situated on several active fault zones and have exhibited considerable responses to the Wenchuan Ms8.0 earthquake of 2008 in China.We collected hourly records of water levels of these wells from 2007to 2009 and processed these data for analysis.The tidal factors,phase lags,and phase-difference changes of tidal residuals of each well were calculated.We found that when the Wenchuan quake happened,the tidal factors of the 4 wells were changing rapidly,while their phase lags and phase differences of tidal residuals declined swiftly,which may reflect the stress and strain changes of the well-aquifer system during the seismic generation.

Land subsidence monitoring by D-InSAR technique

Nowadays, the researches of using Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (D-InSAR) tech- nique to monitor the land subsidence are mainly on how to qualitatively analyze the subsidence areas and values, but the analysis of subsidence process and mechanism are insufficient. In order to resolve these problems, 6 scenes of ERS1/2 images captured during 1995 and 2000 in a certain place of Jiangsu province were selected to obtain the subsidence and velocities in three time segments by ''two-pass'' D- InSAR method. Then the relationships among distributions of pumping wells, exploitation quantity of groundwater, and confined water levels were studied and the subsidence mechanism was systematically analyzed. The results show that using D-InSAR technique to monitor the deformation of large area can obtain high accuracies, the disadvantages of classical observation methods can be remedied and there is a linear relationship among the velocities of land subsidence, the water level and the exploitation quantity.