The Characteristic of Vertical Stress in the Fill of Piled Embankments

Piled embankments has technical and economical advantages over other soft ground improvement methods. The load transfer mechanism in piled embankments is referred to as arching effect. Piled embankments are generally related to the advantage of soil arching effects of granular soil. Most of present research on piled embankments is focusing on the soil arching effect, but there is lack of investigation on the vertical stress distribution in the inner soil arching under embankments. In this paper a new analytic solution called multi-arching theory is applied to investigate the behavior of soil arching. The solution shows the stress distribution in piled embankments as follows; the vertical stress above the soil arching increased as geostatic state, and inside of the soil arching the vertical stress decreased nonlinearly, which reflects the mechanism of soil arching effect and the vertical stress distribution in piled embankments. The theoretical solutions show good agreements with model test data. The results demonstrate that the distribution of vertical stress in embankments is helpful in understanding the behavior of piled embankments.