Comparison Analysis of Buildings Settlement, Calculated in Accordance with Rheological Properties of Soils (Based on the Geotechnical Conditions of St. Petersburg)

Abstract

Soft soils are well represented as the foundation of buildings all over the world. Settlements of buildings that are built on soft soils are developing over decades and often uneven. This can cause structural damages to constructions and as consequence unplanned repairs or even collapses of buildings in general. To justify the use of different models of soil mechanics it is necessary to carry out their verification. Verification of the model consists of compliance to the simple laboratory experiments and of the adequacy of the field tests description. And the most important thing is that the results of calculations should be based on comparison between series of field observations. The principal difficulty of comparing calculation results with field observations is that the actual soil deformation is developing over a long time, and most of the calculation methods are aimed to obtain finite values of deformations. Comparison between data of finite deformations and data of field observations is not quite correct, because, as a rule, in-situ (field) observations recorded incomplete development process of deformations but not only the final result of settlement. Therefore, to compare these calculations and observations we should select calculation models that can examine the development of deformations in time. Based on the above, it is interesting to analyze the applicability of the most common engineering methods and calculation models of the soils that underlie different calculation programs used in practice.