Abstract:A pit-in-pit foundation pit is a common form in engineering. The secondary release of soil stress caused by secondary excavation will significantly change the overall stability of the foundation pit. Taking a pit-in-pit foundation pit project in Nanjing as the engineering background, based on Plaxis finite element analysis, the Hardening-Soil constitutive model and strength reduction method are used to reveal the instability and failure mechanism of pit-in-pit structure, and systematically analyze the influences of the embedded ratio of the external wall and the pit toe coefficient on the stability factor of the foundation pit. The results show that under the specific combinations of the embedded ratio of the external wall and the pit toe coefficient, the excavation of the inner pit will change the whole sliding surface form of the foundation pit to form two differentiated uplift failure modes. The increase of the embedded ratio of the external wall can effectively enhance the stability factor of the foundation pit and stabilize it. The variations in the pit toe coefficient directly correspond to different instability modes, and are the key influence parameters to control the pit-in-pit safety and stability factors.