Deformation measurement of a soil mixing retaining wall using terrestrial laser scanning
This work addresses monitoring needs for civil engineers to prevent catastrophic accidents from retaining wall failures during excavation, but it is incremental as it applies existing laser scanning technology to a specific case.
The paper applied terrestrial laser scanning to measure lateral deformations of a soil mixing retaining wall at an excavation site, finding that the deformations derived from laser scanning were consistent with reference measurements at the top part of the wall, with the multi-scale-model-to-model method identified as the most accurate for deformation estimation.
Retaining walls are often built to prevent excessive lateral movements of the ground surrounding an excavation site. During an excavation, failure of retaining walls could cause catastrophic accidents and hence their lateral deformations are monitored regularly. Laser scanning can rapidly acquire the spatial data of a relatively large area at fine spatial resolutions, which is ideal for monitoring retaining walls' deformations. This paper attempts to apply laser scanning to measurements of the lateral deformations of a soil mixing retaining wall at an ongoing excavation site. Reference measurements by total station and inclinometer were also conducted to verify those from the laser scanning. The deformations derived using laser scanning data were consistent with the reference measurements at the top part of the retaining wall (i.e., mainly the ring beam of the wall). This research also shows that the multi-scale-model-to-model method was the most accurate deformation estimation method on the research data.