A Study on the Mechanism of Consolidation

Abstract

Reducing the linear Biot's equations into a single governing equation, the mechanism ofmulti-dimensional consolidation is considered by means of a variational principle. Particularly, the investigation is made for the geometrical meaning of the linear relation between the distribution of excess pore water pressure and that of deformation, which is obtained by observing the consolidation process from the final steady state. As the results of the present study, we can conclude that (1) Biot's equations of consolidation are reduced into a single governing equation with the excess pore water pressure as the only unknown function, if we choose the final steady state as the reference, (2) the consolidation process is interpreted as a series of minimum norm problems in a metric vector space, i.e., the Function Space, and (3) the equilibrium condition of consolidation is equivalent to determining a point in some subset which has the shortest distance from the origin of the Function Space.