Filed Test And Analysis Of Embankment On Soft Clay Foundations With Reinforced Sand Blankets

The soft clay has a lot of characteristics such as the low strength, high deformability and low permeability, when building embankments on soft clay foundation, the settlement will continues to a long time, the total and the differential settlements are very large. So measures must be taken to improve the performance of the soft clay foundation. There are many kinds of measures, in recent years, the practice has proved that using geosynthetics reinforced sand blankets to improve the performance of the soft clay foundation is simple, speedy and economical. But the theoretic study has been given less consideration, the opinion about whether the reinforced sand blankets can reduce the settlement of the soft clay foundation is different.The filed test of embankments on soft clay foundation with sand blankets is conducted on four section which geological condition and filling highness are approximately same. Four types of project are used, that is: only sand blankets, one layer of geogrid reinforced sand blankets, two layers of geogrid reinforced sand blankets, one layer of geocell reinforced sand blankets. The testing substance consists of the changing settlement of the soft clay foundation and the press's distribution on the surface of the foundation and the changing tension in geosynthetics. The aim is to study the mechanism and effect of the reinforced sand blankets, to provide data and reference for the wide application of geosynthetics. The results show that the geosynthetics reinforced sand blankets can improve the ability to resist deformation of the soft clay foundation and reduce the settlement in a certain extent.The finite element analysis is carried out using the commercial software ANSYS. The results show that using the routine numerical model, parameters and the computational method, the results are different from the test, cannot reflect the engineering practice completely.