Influence of permeability on creep development: A comparative study of oedometer test and field-scale berm

Department of Civil Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

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Abstract

The estimation of settlements in soil that exhibits creep is a challenging task. This paper first numerically replicates oedometric-like tests in PLAXIS for a 1 m thick layer of soil. These simulations investigate the effects of permeability values and consolidation time on the development of the creep displacements. The results show that in the simulations, the part of settlements related to creep is affected by the permeability values at the beginning, and that the differences are large; however, the displacements obtained from the constitutive models considering creep gradually converge after approximately 60 years in the case of the oedometric test simulation. Subsequently, the paper shows that those initial discrepancies are similar in the case of settlement of a real-scale underwater berm. However, a convergence to a single settlement value is not observed in the simulations of the berm.