Probabilistic Analysis of Braced Excavation for Box Drain Construction in Cuttack

Document Type : Research Papers

Authors

1 M.Sc., Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Patna, India.

2 Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Patna, India.

3 Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Patna, India.

Abstract

This study presents a probabilistic failure analysis of a Braced Excavation System (BES) for a 9.0 m deep box drain in Cuttack, Odisha, using Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) and Subset Simulation (SS) methods. The drain spans 3.0 km through highly plastic clayey soil with low shear strength, requiring excavation and braced techniques. Geotechnical field exploration suggests that the soil along the 3.0 km long stretch of the proposed box drain site has a very wide variation. A probabilistic analysis is conducted to ascertain the risk involved in the designed BES. In probabilistic analysis of the BES, cohesion and unit weight of soil are treated as lognormal distributed random variables. Spatially correlated random fields along the depth are generated using the Pearson correlation matrix and the Markov correlation function. MCS with 10000 samples has been run to conduct the probabilistic response of the BES. The paper also presents the results of SS, an advanced version of MCS that enables rapid probabilistic analysis. Furthermore, the results obtained using MCS and SS are compared to establish the relative superiority of SS over MCS.

Keywords

References

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Civil Engineering Infrastructures Journal
Volume 59, Issue 1
June 2026
Pages 85-103

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History

  • Receive Date: 08 February 2024
  • Revise Date: 09 July 2024
  • Accept Date: 05 August 2024

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