Road construction, particularly involving soft soil replacement, draws very heavily on the scarce resources of sand and gravel. One environmentally appealing alternative to complete soft soil replacement is preloading where the sand/gravel materials may be re-used along the road alignment. The paper describes the first application of the method for motorways in connection with the completion of the Danish motorway infrastructure. To validate the feasibility of preloading an instrumented test embankment was constructed in the alignment. In the paper the extensive site characterisation is described in detail together with 2D FEM predictions of the performance. The predictions are compared with the observations obtained for the test embankment.
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