Long term settlements in clay constitute an engineering challenge in road design and construction in areas with deep deposits of soft clay. Soil improvement or foundation of embankments can be rather expensive in construction of roads in such areas. Construction costs have to be balanced to high maintenance costs. To be able to do this in an optimal way, there is a need for prediction of long term settlements with high accuracy.
Research of long term settlements of clay has to a large extent been based upon laboratory testing and development of models based upon this test results. Recent development has to a large extent concerned incorporating creep deformations in the model. Only small extents of published observations are based upon full scale field testing or observations of actual geotechnical projects. In the actual project the aim is to from a basic, conceptually consistent model, set up application rules for long-term predictions of settlements in clay.
The project is carried out at the Division of GeoEngineering, research group Geotechnical Engineering.
Project leader
Claes Alén
Project members
Mats Olsson
Minna Karstunen
Aaro Pirhonen
Peter Heborg
Contact
Mats Olsson