Effect of Soil Spatial Variability on Consolidation Settlement of Large Filled Area

Abstract

Land reclamation, which is usually performed over a large area, is a solution to solve land shortage in many countries. Consolidation settlement after land reclamation is unavoidable and that is why the prediction of consolidation settlement must earnestly be considered in the design stage. In practice, the soils are normally considered to be homogeneous by ignoring the uncertainty of soil properties. Although stochastic finite element (FE) method has been carried out to investigate consolidation behaviors in some previous works; however, there are only few studies that performed stochastic consolidation settlement over large area based on limited field data. Therefore, in this study, an approach based on stochastic FE considering soil spatial variability is implemented and developed to systematically predict consolidation settlement of large land reclamation. Stochastic FE modeling is established through FE software PLAXIS 2D. Statistical parameters collected from limited field data are analyzed and adopted for stochastic FE analysis. The obtained results showed that the results obtained from stochastic FE are in good agreement with the final settlement which means considering the uncertainties of soil properties is more appropriate to evaluate the risk of problems caused by the settlement.