Semi-analytical solutions to one-dimensional consolidation for unsaturated soils with symmetric semi-permeable drainage boundary

Abstract

This paper presents semi-analytical solutions to Fredlund and Hasan’s one-dimensional consolidation for unsaturated soils under symmetric semi-permeable drainage boundary conditions. Two variables are introduced to transform two coupled governing equations of pore-air and pore-water pressures into an equivalent set of partial differential equations, which are easily solved by the Laplace transform. Then, the pore-air and pore-water pressures, and soil settlement are obtained in the Laplace domain. Crump’s method is adopted to perform the inverse Laplace transform in order to obtain semi-analytical solutions in time domain. It is shown that the present solution is more applicable to various types of drainage boundary conditions, and in a good agreement with existing solutions from the literature. Furthermore, several numerical examples are provided to investigate the consolidation behavior of an unsaturated single-layer soil with traditional drainage boundary (single or double), and single-sided and double-sided semi-permeable drainage boundaries. Finally, it illustrates the changes in pore-air and pore-water pressures and soil settlement with time at different values of symmetric semi-permeable drainage boundary conditions parameters. In addition, parametric studies are conducted by the variations of pore-air and pore-water pressures at different ratios of air-water permeability coefficient and the depth.