Study on Repetitional Consolidation of Clay

Abstract

The actual phenomena for settlements due to repetitional consolidation of the clay layers are observed frequently, but there remains a great number of unsolved problems in the present situation. In this paper the authors propose an approximate method for calculating the amount of consolidation when the repetitional, uniformly distributed surcharge is applied on a saturated clay layer. By means of this method they analized some results of experimental tests using a triaxial apparatus. Although in this approximate method some simplified conditions are assumed in order to facilitate analysis, the test results obtained by a series of triaxial consolidation tests for saturated clay specimens are in considerably good agreement with those of the numerical analysis.