Approximately 10% of the levee systems in the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) portfolio include cantilever pile walls, known as I-Walls. Following the catastrophic I-Wall failures during Hurricane Katrina, there is continued concern about the safe use of I-walls as a flood retention system, its longevity, and its response to major flood events. Over 70 pre-existing I-Wall segments are still in use in the New Orleans area and evaluations are proving challenging due to the limited catalogue of case histories and diversity of failure mechanisms. Recent numerical studies have established that soil properties and embedment length are key to establishing performance indicators for inspectors before, during, and after significant flood events. Validation of these results using systematic, physical models are underway at the Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) Centrifuge Research Complex (CRC). In the experiment a scaled sheet pile wall is embedded at different depths into different soil foundation profiles. Water height in the model is raised for a set period to replicate typical sustained flood loading. A combination of instrumentation and measurement techniques were used during the experiments capturing a variety of key parameters including soil/structure movement and rotation, net soil stress distribution against the wall, bending moment, and general soil behaviour which were then related to system response.
5th European Conference on Physical Modelling in Geotechnics (ECPMG2024)
Geotechnical infrastructure