Stability Evaluation during Staged

Construction
Staged construction uses controlled rates of load application to increase the
foundation stability of structures founded on soft cohesive soils and to improve
the slope stability of tailings dams. Because construction causes positive excess
pore pressures and because actual failures usually occur without significant
drainage, stability analyses should compute the factor of safety against an
undrained failure as the most critical and realistic condition. This requires an
undrained strength analysis (USA) that treats predicted or measured in situ
effective stresses as equal to consolidation stresses in order to calculate
variations in undrained shear strength during construction. The recommended
USA methodology requires a detailed evaluation of changes in vertical stress
history profiles, uses undrained strength ratios obtained from CK 0 U CK0U
tests to account for anisotropy and progressive failure, and is more rational than
stability evaluations based on UU and CIU tri axial compression testing.
Conventional effective stress analyses should not be used for staged
construction because the computed factor of safety inherently assumes a drained
failure that can give highly misleading and unsafe estimates of potential
instability.