Investigation On The Embankment Height & Width Problem Due To The Settlement Of Soft Soil Ground

The deformation of the embankment on expressway is an outstanding problem,because of the high traffic speed and high embankment. And therefore the soft ground improvement is a key issue especially when building the highway in the soft soil. But there is no standard method to design and calculate the height & width problem resulted from the embankment deformation as yet.From the point of view of the practice,there are some concerned problems as for the embankment improved with prefabricated band drains (PVDs),such as the forecaste of the height & width from the influence of deformation and etc. In this paper,associated with the test embankment of NingBo(NB) expressway,these problems are analyzed by finite element method (FEM).First,the general background of the project is introduced,coordinating of the theory of plane-strain consolidation deformations and the relative concepts about the FEM are presented. Second,the program of FEM calculation is analyzed in details. Based on the measurement of the test embankment,experiential formula of the calculation of the height & width problem caused by embankment deformation is proposed,and the corresponding FEM formula is put forward. Then the two methods are compared on the basis of the calculated results and the data of test embankment of NB expressway. As a result,some conclusions are obtained to use in practice in the future.