Numerical Simulation And Analysis Of Differential Settlement In Widened Roads

Due to the requirement of increasing traffic, it is very urgent to widen the existing highways in china. The roadbed settlements in highway construction, especially differential settlement, will lead to the cleft and stagger of pavement, and largely affect the quality of driving as well as used life-span. So how to bring down the settlements and clear off the danger made by settlements has been an important task in highway construction.Based on the analysis of actual study on the differential settlement of widened road, the shortage of these methods is brought forward. General purpose finite program ANSYS is adopted in the analysis. DP model is chosen to consider the non-linearity of soil, and then finite element analysis of widened road is carried out in this paper.With the aid of a elastic-plastic finite element package, the settlement of the ground, the deformation of the embankment, associated with their stress distribution are analyzed. Additionally, the computed solutions are compared with those of in-site measurement. In particular the differential settlement behavior over newly-built and existing subgrades was assessed to explain premature damages of pavements commonly found in widened road sections. The law of the differential settlement is summarized, and some suggestions on the design of widened road are presented in the paper.