Abstract:
This study is focused on the causes for the road cut failures and suggest a
methodology to design road orientation to minimize cut failures considering
geology of the rock present in the area. In the past few years, several road cut
failures have been recorded in Sri Lanka and there are development plans to
construct expressways in hilly areas of the country. Hence, this study is important
to minimize and control road cut failures while designing road orientation in a
scientific manner. Several of studies were carried out to find the relationship
between rock properties of the slope and occurrence of cut failures. This study helps
to create a forecasting model for different scenarios. In this study, in order to
validate the outcomes, some software were used. “DipAnalyst 2.0” is one of them
and is a slope stability analysis software, which is designed to perform kinematic
analysis for rock slopes and also calculating factor of safety values for plane and
wedge failures based on the limit equilibrium theory. In this study, we identified
that rock of the study area mainly dip towards the road (dip direction is parallel to
the road direction). It is the main cause for lot of failures.