Although the construction of concrete piles has a relevant environmental footprint, they are commonly used to reduce settlements of embankments on soft soil strata. A more sustainable choice to further reduce settlements (and, consequently, the number of piles) is to place geosynthetics below the embankment. However, existing design methods cannot calculate settlements at the embankment top and cannot be used to optimise the number of piles in a displacement-based design. In this note, an innovative model for assessing settlements at the top of Geosynthetic-Reinforced and Pile-Supported embankments induced by the embankment construction process is presented and validated against finite difference numerical analyses. The model is used to optimise the design of both piles and geosynthetic, and applied to a practical example, where the mass of CO2 saved by designing geosynthetics to reduce the pile number.
Graphical Abstract
The use of piles as settlement reducers in the design of artificial embankments on soft soil strata is nowadays very common. The design methods employed in the current engineering practice are based on simplified approaches not allowing the assessment of average and differential settlements at the top of the embankment. In this paper, a model to estimate both differential and average displacements at the top of the embankment is introduced. This, based on the choice of substructuring the spatial domain and employing a suitably conceived upscaling procedure, is an extension to the case of rough pile shafts of a model originally conceived by the authors for smooth piles. To conceive and calibrate the model, the authors performed a series of numerical simulations mainly aimed at highlighting the mechanical processes taking place at the pile shaft. From a practical point of view, this model can fruitfully be employed in displacement based design approaches and to optimize pile diameter and spacing.
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