THE STABILITY OF A TRAPDOOR

Abstract

The technical note is related to the prediction of lower bound stability numbers of a trapdoor embedded in a saturated homogeneous cohesive soil under undrained conditions, using discrete elements in conjunction with nonlinear programming. For various embedment ratios, the effect of the mesh pattern on the results has been studied and generalized mesh patterns have been proposed for both shallow and deep trapdoors. A comparison of the results with those available in the literature reveals that for deep trapdoors the present method gives better lower bounds and for shallow trapdoors the results are in good agreement.