Abstract
This study has proposed a novel method for identifying degraded areas in geotechnical structures such as piping holes and cavities due to seepage flow using data assimilation. An existing method for identifying degraded areas using the particle filter, which was proposed by the authors, cannot identify the degraded areas with high accuracy in case of simultaneous identification of several degraded areas. To overcome the above technical issue, the more advanced method with a step-by-step identification procedure is newly proposed. In this paper, numerical tests of a geotechnical structure loaded by a road-roller are conducted to study whether the proposed procedure can identify several degraded areas. The results of numerical tests show that the proposed procedure can identify several degraded areas in geotechnical structures with high accuracy.
