Correct estimation of the scour around vertical piles in the field exposed to oscillatory waves is very important for many offshore structures and coastal engineering projects. Conventional predictive formulas for the geometric properties of scour hole, however, are not able to provide sufficiently accurate results. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are simplified mathematical representation of the human brain. Three-layer normal feed-forward ANN is a powerful tool for input-output mapping and has been widely used in civil engineering problems. In this article the ANNs approach is used to predict the geometric properties of the scour around vertical pile. Two different ANNs including multilayer perceptron (with four different learning rules) and radial basis functions neural networks are used for this purpose. The results show that a three-layer normal feed-forward multilayer perceptron with quick propagation (QP) learning rule can predict the scour hole properties successfully. 相似文献
This study aimed to identify displacement properties of landslide masses at the initiation of failure and factors that affect the landslides activities in areas where quick clay is found. We set up a research site in a quick clay deposit area in Norway and monitored the displacements of landslide masses and meteorological and hydrological factors for a long period of time using an automatic monitoring system. The system collected data for two landslides that occurred at the site from the start of their movement until their ultimate collapse.
The two landslides that were monitored showed definite secondary and tertiary creep stages before they collapsed. One of the landslides moved from the secondary stage to the tertiary creep stage when another landslide occurred nearby. The tertiary stage of this landslide showed reconstruction of short primary, secondary, and tertiary creep stages. These phenomena suggested that (1) the stress at the end of the landslide mass was released during the nearby landslide, and (2) a new stress distribution was formed in the landslide mass. The critical strain differed for 14 times between the two landslide masses we monitored. The difference was likely attributable to the difference in the contents of quick clay, which shows small critical stress against slope failure, as well as topological factors.
Our analyses of the effects of hydrological and meteorological factors on landslides showed that the precipitation of 3 and 10 days before six slope failures as the final stages of the landslides that had occurred in the research area was no different from the mean precipitation of periods that showed no slope failure, suggesting that precipitation had no direct effects on the collapse of the landslide masses. On the other hand, the traveling velocities of the landslide masses during the secondary creep stage, which was prior to their collapse, were affected by the water content of the soil and precipitation (and the amount of snowmelt water), but was little correlated with the pore-water pressure of the quick clay layer. We also found that the presence of snow cover scarcely affected landslide movements. 相似文献
Pockmarks form where fluids discharge through seafloor sediments rapidly enough to make them quick, and are common where gas is present in near-seafloor sediments. This paper investigates how gas might lead to pockmark formation. The process is envisioned as follows: a capillary seal traps gas beneath a fine-grained sediment layer or layers, perhaps layers whose pores have been reduced in size by hydrate crystallization. Gas accumulates until its pressure is sufficient for gas to invade the seal. The seal then fails completely (a unique aspect of capillary seals), releasing a large fraction of the accumulated gas into an upward-propagating gas chimney, which displaces water like a piston as it rises. Near the seafloor the water flow causes the sediments to become “quick” (i.e., liquefied) in the sense that grain-to-grain contact is lost and the grains are suspended dynamically by the upward flow. The quickened sediment is removed by ocean-bottom currents, and a pockmark is formed. Equations that approximately describe this gas–piston–water-drive show that deformation of the sediments above the chimney and water flow fast enough to quicken the sediments begins when the gas chimney reaches half way from the base of its source gas pocket to the seafloor. For uniform near-surface sediment permeability, this is a buoyancy control, not a permeability control. The rate the gas chimney grows depends on sediment permeability and the ratio of the depth below seafloor of the top of the gas pocket to the thickness of the gas pocket at the time of seal failure. Plausible estimates of these parameters suggest gas chimneys at Blake Ridge could reach the seafloor in less than a decade or more than a century, depending mainly on the permeability of the deforming near-surface sediments. Since these become quick before gas is expelled, gas venting will not provide a useful warning of the seafloor instabilities that are related to pockmark formation. However, detecting gas chimney growth might be a useful risk predictor. Any area underlain by a gas chimney that extends half way or more to the surface should be avoided. 相似文献
