Composite anchors are special passive sub-horizontal reinforcements recently developed for remediation of unstable slopes. They are composed of a hollow steel bar, installed by a self-drilling technique in the soil, coupled with tendons cemented in the inner hole to increase the global anchor tensile strength. The anchors are primarily intended to stabilise medium to deep landslides, both in soils or weathered rock masses. Among the valuable advantages of composite anchors are their low cost, ease of installation, and flexibility in execution, as testified by a rapid increase in their use in recent years. The bond strength at the soil-anchor interface is the main parameter for both the design of these reinforcements and the evaluation of their long-term effects for landslide stabilisation. After a brief description of the composite anchor technology, this paper presents a novel methodology for monitoring the strain and stress accumulated in the anchors over time when installed in an unstable slope. The new monitoring system is composed of a distributed fibre optic sensing system, exploiting the optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) technique, to measure the strain exerted on the optical fibre cable embedded with the tendons inside the bar. The system permits an evaluation of the axial force distribution in the anchor and the soil-anchor interface actions with a spatial resolution of up to some millimetres. Therefore, it allows determination of the stabilising capability associated with the specific hydrogeological conditions of the site. Furthermore, upon an extensive validation, the system may become part of a standard practice to be applied in this type of intervention, aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of the anchor installation and its evolution over time.

In this work, the mechanical response of a steel wire mesh panel against a punching load is studied starting from laboratory test conditions and extending the results to field applications. Wire meshes anchored with bolts and steel plates are extensively used in rockfall protection and slope stabilization. Their performances are evaluated through laboratory tests, but the mechanical constraints, the geometry and the loading conditions may strongly differ from the in situ conditions leading to incorrect estimations of the strength of the mesh. In this work, the discrete element method is used to simulate a wire mesh. After validation of the numerical mesh model against experimental data, the punching behaviour of an anchored mesh panel is investigated in order to obtain a more realistic characterization of the mesh mechanical response in field conditions. The dimension of the punching element, its position, the anchor plate size and the anchor spacing are varied, providing analytical relationships able to predict the panel response in different loading conditions. Furthermore, the mesh panel aspect ratio is analysed showing the existence of an optimal value. The results of this study can provide useful information to practitioners for designing secured drapery systems, as well as for the assessment of their safety conditions.

A procedure aimed at forecasting the velocity trend of a landslide for a period of some hours to one or two days is proposed here together with its MATLAB implementation. The method is based on continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and convolutional neural network (CNN) applied to rainfall and velocity time series provided by a real-time monitoring system. It is aimed at recognizing the conditions that induce a strong increase, or even a significant decrease, in the average velocity of the unstable slope. For each evaluation time, the rainfall and velocity scalograms related to the previous days (e.g., two weeks) are computed by means of CWT. A CNN recognizes the velocity trend defined in the training stage corresponds to these scalograms. In this way, forecasts about the start, persistence, and end of a critical event can be provided to the decision makers. An application of the toolbox to a landslide (Perarolo di Cadore landslide, Eastern Alps, Italy) is also briefly described to show how the parameters can be chosen in a real case and the corresponding performance.