Settlement behaviour of peat underneath a sand and sawdust embankment: centrifuge modelling
Settlement behaviour of peat underneath a sand and sawdust embankment: centrifuge modelling
Peat soils, when impacted by external loads, compress and experience settlement. Infrastructure such as roads founded on peat may suffer serviceability issues when settlement predictions are incorrect. Nevertheless, most predictions build on results from laboratory tests on small samples which could be misleading. Using the results of three identical, plane-strain centrifuge tests, this paper examines the settlement behaviour of a natural peat layer of 7.5 m thickness in prototype scale during construction of a 1 m high sand and 1 m high sawdust embankment. The embankment loading was replicated by increasing the centrifuge acceleration level to 50 times gravity. Measured pore pressure changes and peat deformations, obtained by image-based deformation techniques, indicate that the fibrous peat was very permeable and that laboratory-based settlement predictions were overly conservative. The settlement patterns observed in the three tests agreed well, but the heterogeneity of the natural peat samples affected the magnitude of the measured displacements. A comparison to full-scale field tests suggests that the centrifuge tests captured the prototype performance well.
S. Ritter; Loretta Von der Tann; Marianne Dahl; Priscilla Paniagua; Mike Long
5th European Conference on Physical Modelling in Geotechnics (ECPMG2024)
Onshore and offshore foundation systems
https://doi.org/10.53243/ECPMG2024-61
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