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Compression characteristics of ultra-soft clays subjected to simulated staged preloading

  • Highway Engineering
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Abstract

Ultra-soft soils have high water content, low strength, and high compressibility. Staged preloading has been commonly used in China to improve ultra-soft soils during land reclamation before highways and other structures are constructed. In this study, seven series of one-dimensional consolidation tests were performed on undisturbed, remolded, or reconstituted specimens of three types of soils subjected to simulated, staged loading. Test results showed that the compression curves had two straight lines, which intersected at a yield stress. Burland’s concept of the intrinsic compression line was adopted to present the compression curves of reconstituted clays at different initial water contents. The intrinsic compression line was modified to better fit the test data for the stresses lower than 40 kPa. The coefficient of soil consolidation increased with an increase of the effective vertical stress as a result of the rate of increase in constrained modulus higher than that of decrease in permeability. The maximum coefficient of secondary consolidation, Cámax, was correlated with the ratio of the initial void ratio to the void ratio at yield stress by a unique curve, which was proposed to distinguish the pre-yield stress from the post-yield stress state. Test results showed that the secondary compression characteristics depended on the applied stress and the initial void ratio.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Civil Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Huayang Lei, Xuechao Wang & Li Chen

  2. Key Laboratory of Coast Civil Structure Safety of Education Ministry, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Huayang Lei

  3. Key Laboratory of Geotechnical and Underground Engineering, Tongji University, Ministry of Education, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Huayang Lei & Maosong Huang

  4. Dept. of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE), The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Jie Han

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  1. Huayang Lei
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  2. Xuechao Wang
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Correspondence to Jie Han.

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Lei, H., Wang, X., Chen, L. et al. Compression characteristics of ultra-soft clays subjected to simulated staged preloading. KSCE J Civ Eng 20, 718–728 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12205-015-0343-y

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