One-dimensional self-weight consolidation of a lumpy clay fill

The need to use a large amount of dredged and excavated materials as fill for land reclamation necessitates an examination of the consolidation of a lumpy fill. Experimental results have shown the existence of two systems of voids in such a fill: inter-lump voids and intra-lump voids. The consolidation of this fill is highly complicated, and a simple box-spring model analogy is used to provide a better interpretation of the consolidation of this fill. To model this consolidation, the dualporosity model developed for fissured clay is used to model the consolidation of the lumpy fill; the primary motivation is the similarity between fissured clay and a lumpy fill with inter-lump voids. In the paper, this theory is re-derived using a two-phase flow analogy. Self-weight is explicitly included in the derivation: this is considered to be more relevant than the case of surcharge only, as the fill is often left to stand for a long period before sand fill is placed on top. A previously derived analytical solution ...