Field Performance of Transition Rigid Piled Embankment With Surcharged Vertical Drain Over Soft Ground

Abstract

Commonly, thick filling works over soft clay is aided with piled embankment at bridge approach to reduce differential settlement between the piled abutment and embankment over soft ground. However, long stretched thick filling works over soft ground requires substantial resources and time to construct rigid piled embankment. Generally for such long stretched and thick filling development over soft ground, other ground treatment such as prefabricated vertical drain (PVD) with surcharge is introduce to reduce the cost of construction. However, excessive total and differential settlement at the surcharged prefabricated vertical drain (SPVD) and rigid piled embankment intersection during post construction period may leads to rectification works over the time. This paper presents the field performance of an alternative design approach for long stretched thick filled embankment over soft clay at structure approach to control the differential settlement between the two conventional ground treatment approaches. With the introduction of the alternative ground treatment approach at the intersection of the two conventional ground treatment, post construction total settlement and differential settlement is reduced significantly.

A study on settlements of road embankments on soft ground using vertical drains

“…A constitutive model was used to incorporate the effects of fabric anisotropy, structure and time. The numerical predictions were compared with field measurements and the results indicated that the creep model provides an improved approximation of field settlements; Ramli, Hossein, Puspanathan, and See-Sew in [5] conducted a case study in Tapin, South Kalimantan where two trial embankment sections were constructed using backfill materials transported from off-sites and from the local materials respectively. The result showed that the settlement under the embankment using the usual backfill material was bigger than the one with the combination of the local soil; in [6] a numerical modeling of the responses of Ballina test embankment was performed using an improved EVP-SANICLAY constitutive model with a novel rotational hardening (RH) law.…”