Prefabricated vertical drain in marine clay soil using plaxis 2D

Abstract

Due to the rapid development in Malaysia, area that can be considered as suitable soil which has high resistance to support the structure naturally has becoming increasingly rare. This phenomenon has force engineers to works in soft ground with high compressibility layer. The main risk for development on soft soil is settlement. There are many researches that have been conducted in order to overcome this problem. Prefabricated Vertical Drain (PVD) is one of the methods used to accelerate the settlement, hence made it more suitable for development. This study aims to presents a case study of field data associated to settlement of treated marine clay soil using PVD with different spacing with finite element analysis. Data obtained from site instrumentation will be analysed by Asoaka method and shall be compared with PLAXIS 2D simulation analysis. The result shows that PVD was able to accelerate the consolidation process and suitable to be used as soft ground improvement technique. The rate of settlement was inversely proportional with the drain spacing. Based on the series of modelling it was proved that the prefabricated vertical drain is an effective method for increasing ground stability by accelerate the consolidation process thus suitable to be used as soft ground improvement technique and different PVD spacing affect the soil settlements analysis in term of settlement rate and excess pore water pressure.