ABSTRACT
In geotechnical engineering, most of the parameters have an inherent variability which should be considered in the analysis and design to attain more reliable results. The object of this study is to investigate the influence of the variability of soil strength parameters on the variability of the factor of safety of soil nail walls using the probabilistic option in the Slide2 software. In this study, Single Random Variable approach (SRV) and spatial variability analysis have been adopted to carry out the probabilistic analysis. Moreover, the effect of soil nail bond strength variability (while soil strength parameters are constant), which causes the variability of the pullout resistance, on the variability of factor of safety is investigated. The results show that considering variability of parameters such as soil strength parameters and bond strength has a remarkable effect on the wall factor of safety distribution and therefore designers should not solely rely on deterministic analysis results. Also, it is concluded that spatial variability analysis shows more realistic results compared to SRV analysis.
