The consolidation of soils under stochastic initial excess pore pressure

Abstract

A deterministic mathematical model for simulating the consolidation of clays due to application of pore pressures in excess of the hydrostatic value has been presented in terms of the well-known diffusion equation. The distribution of the initial excess pore pressure u 0 is usually assumed to be inform, ignoring the large variability of soil and loading conditions. In this paper, the distribution of u 0 is represented as a stochastic process. The expectation and variance functions of the solution process under a stochastic uncertainty in u 0 are computed analytically. The modulated white noise is then used to obtain a practical engineering solution for the one-dimensional consolidation process, which represents the stochastic variations of u 0 . A brief numerical example is presented to further illustrate such effects. The methodology presented in the paper improves the reliability of predicting time rates of excess pore pressure dissipation during the consolidation process.