Soil improvement for taxiway and apron due to soft ground problem

Abstract

Soft ground created a lot of problems to the structure or pavement. The safety of the aircraft movements through taxiway and parking the aircraft on parking apron is subjected to standard as required by International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Thus, soft soil affected the performance of the pavement by creating defects such as rutting, crack and settlement which might result foreign object damage (FOD) to the aircraft engine. This paper analysed the recommendation soil improvement method, compared the magnitude of settlement from site investigation data using manual simulating and validated the settlement using SIGMA/W software for accuracy. In this study, it was limited to the aircraft loadings of A330 on taxiway and the aircraft loadings of A320 on dispersal area/apron pavement based on Miri Airport condition. This study indicated that the differences displacement from site measurement calculation simulation and the software simulation about 15% for taxiway and 25 % for dispersal area/apron pavement.