Modified Method for prefabricated vertical drain consolidation analysis

Abstract

Ground improvement with the prefabricated vertical drain (PVD) has become widely employed for soft ground treatment because of its economical and efficient method. While numerous numerical and analytical methods have been derived for PVD however, it is still an extensively high demand for a simpler and more accurate method for design steps. This paper proposes a method for solving the problem of one-dimensional (1D) consolidation with prefabricated vertical drains. The current approach introduces a 1D equivalent permeability, increasing linearly with depth to perform the consolidation of soft ground improved with PVD. The analytical solutions have been carried out and verified by analyses for two cases of one-way drainage and two-way drainage for uniform soil layer. The results show that the error of excess pore pressure determined by the proposed method is less than that obtained by the simpler method of Chai and smaller than 10% compared to the theoretical solution. The paper also compares the analytical solution with the FEM by ABAQUS software. It is found that the excess pore pressures and consolidation degrees obtained by these methods are similar and close to the theory. These confirm that the introduced 1D equivalent permeability can be employed to perform the consolidation of PVD improvement by analytical and FEM methods.

Keywords

• 1d consolidation
• pvd
• analytical solution
• modified method