Multidisciplinary Analysis and Modelling of a River Embankment Affected by Piping

The paper presents a multidisciplinary analysis carried out for the characterization and monitoring of a levee in Bozen Province, North Italy. The study treats a small section of the Adige river embankments, interested in the recent past by moderate piping phenomena and subjected to some subsequent interventions for the risk mitigation. The data acquired with an Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) investigation and an optical fiber distributed temperature sensing (DTS) are compared to boreholes information, laboratory tests and piezometers measurements. They provided a multi-dimensional characterization of the levee and of the close subsoil water-meadows, possible piping preferential paths. Since the presence of more permeable lenses within the silty matrix characterizing the levee foundations, the subsequent 2D seepage analysis was carried out with the Boolean Stochastic Generation (BoSG) method, which randomly generates lenses with specific rheological properties within a matrix with another set of parameters. The soil configurations that are more congruent with the monitoring data were selected within a pool of 360 simulations, providing information about the probable seepage mechanism within the levee and the reliability of the interventions.