Abstract
This study endeavors to predict the settlement that could occur in the future at a site where settlement due to embankment loading is already occurring at present. In the site studied here, large residual settlement of as much as 70 cm has already occurred in the 4 years since it entered into service. It is believed that settlement will also continue in the future because excess pore pressure is still present within the clay layers. Furthermore, according to the method of evaluation proposed previously by the authors, which is based on the sensitivity and compression index ratios, it can be judged that the ground includes clays that are sensitive to disturbance and have a strong possibility of large residual settlement. In this paper, simulation of the settlement observed up to now at the site as well as prediction of the settlement that could occur in the future was carried out by deducing the higher compressibilities possessed by the in-situ clays compared with the undisturbed clay specimens in the laboratory. The soil-water coupled finite deformation analysis was employed using the analysis program GEOASIA, in which the constitutive equation for the soil skeleton is mounted with the SYS Cam-clay model. In addition, the effect of modifying the vertical section of the embankment by overlaying in order to counter the settlement was also investigated by numerical analysis. The results showed that such a countermeasure cannot be expected to lead to faster consolidation and that it may require massive funding over a long period of time to cover the maintenance and management costs involved.
