Ground Improvement
Improving ground is easy to specify and hard to prove. These articles deal with the geometry that decides whether a treated block is continuous — column diameter, spacing, overlap and the way verticality tolerance eats into all three with depth — and with what has to be demonstrated before the improvement can be relied on in design.
3 articles
Suction caissons: the suction needed, and the limit
A caisson needs 182.7 kPa of suction to reach depth and lifts its soil plug at 371.8 kPa. Installability is the ratio of those two, and it is 2.04 here.
Vertical drains: the smear zone doubles the time
Hansbo's factor goes from 2.196 to 4.393 when the smear zone is included, so 90% consolidation takes 8.0 months instead of 4.0. The same drains, the same clay.
Jet grout columns: overlap, spacing and verticality
A secant wall 1.0583 m thick at the surface is 0.3555 m thick at 18 m and gone at 20 m, from a 1% verticality tolerance alone. The geometry, worked in full.
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