Abstract
Soil arching, which occurs in the piled embankments, plays an important role in stress redistribution between the relatively soft subsoil and the stiffer piles. The formation of the soil arching depends on the differential settlement of the embankment fill above the pile and the subsoil. The soil arching effect is barely investigated in the literature from the perspective of differential settlement of piles and soils. Based on the discrete element method (DEM), this paper develops a classic trapdoor test model to investigate the differential settlement in piled embankment during the downward movement of the trapdoor, and to explore the formation mechanism of soil arching in equal settlement pattern by changing the width of the pile cap and the height of the embankment. Due to symmetry, only one section of the laboratory test model is simulated herein. It was found that the soil arching formed under the equal settlement pattern remained unchanged after a certain degree of development, and the height of the equal settlement did not change at 0.7(s-a), where s is the pile spacing, and a is the width of the pile cap. The height of the embankment (H) and the width of the pile cap (a) have a significant influence on the formation of the equal settlement pattern when the width of the trapdoor is kept constant. Both the decrease in “H” and the increase in “a” facilitate the differential settlement of the soil between the piles and the pile-soil, enabling the slip surface to develop upward gradually, thereby hindering the formation of the equal settlement pattern.
Highlights
The shear plane stops moving in the upward direction, as shown in Figure 18 for the T3 case, resulting in the formation of the equal settlement pattern
Discrete element software wasmore usedvisible to investigate the wall soil arching downwards, and a shear plane forms extending from the junction of the trap wall and the effect of the equal settlement pattern from the perspective of vertical displacement and pile to the surface of the embankment approximately vertically
By reducing settlement pattern was studied by changing the height of the embankment (H) and the the width of the pile cap (a) which corresponds to a reduction in the height of zone I
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Soil arching effect is a ubiquitous phenomenon occurred in the piled embankment to transfer the vertical stress from the relatively stiff pile to the softer soil due to the differential settlement [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. The soil arching formed in the piled embankments considerably enhanced the load transfer from the relatively stiff piles to the softer subsoil [5,12,13,14,15,16,28,29,30,36] In this regard, this study investigated the soil arching in piled embankments with the 2D DEM modeling software, Particle Flow Code in Two. Dimensions (PFC2D ), version 5.0, developed by Itasca [37]. The DEM model to simulate the 2D trapdoor model presented by Rui et al [24] is developed to analyze the soil arching of piled embankments in equal settlement patterns
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