Determination of Resistance Factors of Load and Resistance Factor Design for Drilled Shaft Based on Load Test

Vertical drains are commonly used to accelerate the consolidation process of soft soils, such as dredged materials, because they additionally provide a radial drainage path in a deep soil deposit. In practice, vertical drains are commonly installed in the process of self-weight consolidation of a dredged soil deposit. The absence of an appropriate analysis tool for this situation makes it substantially difficult to estimate self-weight consolidation behavior considering both vertical and radial drainage. In this paper, a new method has been proposed to take into account both vertical and radial drainage conditions during nonlinear finite strain self-weight consolidation of dredged soil deposits. For 1-D nonlinear finite strain consolidation in the vertical direction, the Morris (2002) theory and the PSDDF analysis are adopted, respectively. On the other hand, to consider the radial drainage, Barron's vertical drain theory (1948) is used. The overall average degree of self-weight consolidation of the dredged soil is estimated using the Carillo formula (1942), in which both vertical and radial drainage are assembled together. A series of large-scale self-weight consolidation experiments being equipped with a vertical drain have been carried out to verify the analysis method proposed in this paper. The results of the new analysis method were generally in agreement with those of the experiments.