Abstract
Landslides are recurring phenomena causing damages to private property, public facilities, and human lives. The need for an affordable instrumentation that can be used to provide an early warning of slope instability to enable the evacuation of vulnerable people, and timely repair and maintenance of critical infrastructure is self-evident. A new emerging technique that correlates soil moisture changes and deformations in slope surface by means of elastic wave propagation in soil was developed. This approach quantifies elastic wave propagation as wave velocity. To verify its applicability, a series of fixed and varied slope model tests, as well as a large scale model test, were conducted. Analysis of the results has established that the elastic wave velocity continuously decreases in response of moisture content and deformation, and there was a distinct surge in the decrease rate of wave velocity with failure initiation, soil deformation was thus envisaged to have more significant effect on elastic wave velocity than water content. It is proposed that a warning be issued at switch of wave velocity decrease rate. Based on these observations, expected operation of the elastic wave velocity monitoring system for landslide prediction in the field application is presented. Consequently, we conclude that the elastic wave velocity monitoring technique has the potential to contribute to landslide prediction.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of PhD studies of first author. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial supports provided by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51479097, 51279086, and 51323014), the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering (Grant No. 2016-KY-2), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2017M620048).
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Appendix
Appendix
Relationship between amplitude of the signal that can be received and distance. a Small-scale model test. b Large-scale model test
Relationship between elastic wave velocity against volumetric water content and tilt angle, presented through a 3-D plot for fixed model tests with surface layer thickness of a 5 cm, b 10 cm, and c 15 cm
Relationship between elastic wave velocity against volumetric water content and tilt angle, presented through a 3-D plot for varied model tests with surface layer thickness of a 5 cm, b 10 cm, and c 15 cm
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Chen, Y., Irfan, M., Uchimura, T. et al. Elastic wave velocity monitoring as an emerging technique for rainfall-induced landslide prediction. Landslides 15, 1155–1172 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-017-0943-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-017-0943-3