Geotechnical instrumentation of a tangent cast-in-place pile wall in Peace River, Alberta

ABSTRACT: This paper presents the results of a geotechnical instrumentation program for a tangent cast-in-place pile wall located on a sidehill road embankment on Highway 986:01, near Peace River, Alberta. The wall was constructed in 2016 to prevent further retrogressive failure of the south slope of the embankment. The pile wall is 142 m long and included three rows of ground anchors. The instrumentation program included in-place Shape Accel Array inclinometers, inclinometers casings, load cells and vibrating wire piezometers. Measured wall deflections and anchor loads were used to back calculate earth pressures imposed on the wall and pile bending moments during and after construction. The back calculation was carried out using a soil-structure interaction analysis implemented in Mathcad and validated in S-Frame. Additional analyses were completed using the finite-element software SIGMA/W.