REINFORCED PILED EMBANKMENT FOR A HIGH-SPEED RAILWAY OVER SOFT SOIL: A NUMERICAL AND ANALYTICAL INVESTIGATION

摘要

A geosynthetic, reinforced, piled embankment is an effective and economic method to solve the problems of possible bearing failure, unacceptable settlement and slope instability for an embankment built over soft soil; this has led to its widespread use, especially for high-speed railway embankments. Some design methods have been developed to assess the performance of these reinforced structures, which are mainly based on the results from small-scale models and numerical simulations. However, the reliability of these methods needs to be validated under full-scale field tests. This paper presents a numerical and analytical study for a full-scale field test of the Fengyang high-speed railway embankment. The results were analyzed and discussed in terms of the settlement of subsoil, the stress-concentration ratio (SCR), the axial force and the frictional stress of the pile. They showed that the settlement of the subsoil, from both the finite-element method (FEM) and the analytical method, were in good agreement with the measurement, and thus was a reliable parameter to assess the performance of the piled embankment with reasonable accuracy. The SCR was overestimated by the modified Terzaghi method, with a difference of 25%, while it was underestimated by the FEM, with a difference of approximately 20%. It was also shown that the tensile force in the reinforcement could be effectively assessed using the proposed analytical method, while it was overestimated by the FEM with a difference of 44%.