Abstract
Timber pile is an ancient technology applied in soft ground improvement for more than 1000 years. With the rise of many high-rise buildings, many types of modern mechanized-construction piles are widely developed and applied; for example, steel pile, precast concrete pile, sand pile, and gravel pile are widely used instead of timber piles. Yet, in some special conditions, timber piles have certain advantages due to their environment-friendly characteristics, which result in obvious economic benefits and suitability. To overcome the weakness of the traditional timber pile technology and expand its application in engineering practice, a drained-timber pile technique was put forward. This technology is to wrap the permeable filter-type drainage geotextile around the timber pile, so that the timber pile not only has the replacement function to strengthen the foundation but also has the drainage function, can accelerate the pore water discharge, and speeds up the soft soil foundation consolidation. The reduced scale soil-column consolidation model was designed to perform the consolidation tests for the soil column with a drained-timber rod. In total, eight types of soil-column consolidation tests were carried out to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the drained-timber pile technique. The results revealed that, under the same loading and consolidation time, the drained-timber rod can obviously increase the degree of consolidation when compared with traditional timber rod. It can be expected that the drained-timber pile technique has a good application prospect for the construction of medium-small hydraulic structures and for the treatment of super soft clay.
Highlights
Pine pile is an ancient technology applied in soft ground improvement for more than 1000 years
With the enhancement of environmental protection and resource protection conscious, the timber pile technique has been attracting the attention of engineers and Advances in Civil Engineering researchers due to its environment-friendly characteristics, which results in obvious economic benefits and suitability
Under the same loading and drained condition, the two geotextile layers of the drained-timber rod can play the role of radial drainage well and contribute a lot to the total consolidation degree; (3) for the test L3 and test S0, the settlement curves under each loading step are almost similar, it means that for the drained-timber rods, with two drained layers of geotextile, the radial drainage has a dominant contribution to the total consolidation degree, and the vertical drainage has little contribution to the total consolidation degree, the phenomenon reveals that the two thin layers of geotextile are quite effective for increasing the radial consolidation
Summary
Pine pile is an ancient technology applied in soft ground improvement for more than 1000 years. Even after more than one thousand years, wood reinforcement under the Mizuki embankment in North Kyushu, Japan, still has high durability in an underwater-table condition [1]. E soft clay foundation of the ancient Water-Gate site of the Southern Taizhou (Jiangsu Province, China) that was reinforced with timber piles still remains in a relatively complete state more than one thousand years at underground water condition [2]. Timber piles are widely employed in small-medium size hydraulic engineering structures in regions with rich pine resources [7–9]. Poungchompu et al [11, 12] investigated the effectiveness and possibility of timber raft and pile foundation for road embankment built on Ariake soft clay (Kyushu, Japan) through laboratory model tests
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