Hydroconsolidation Tutorial 10-1

Hydroconsolidation Tutorial
Some soils are very sensitive to moisture content and may experience
swelling or collapse due to wetting. In arid and semi-arid climates,
natural soils and man-made fills have been known to experience
considerable volume reduction as moisture content increases due to
irrigation, urbanization etc. This tutorial will describe how to simulate
this hydroconsolidation in Settle3D.

The finished model can be found in the Tutorial 10

Hydroconsolidation.s3z file in the Examples > Tutorials folder in your
Settle3D installation folder.

Topics covered

Hydroconsolidation / collapsible soils

Swelling

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Model description

In California it is common for housing estates to be constructed on top of

thick fill layers used to fill in steep canyons. These fills generally perform
well when dry but significant wetting can occur due to irrigation and
other urban activities. Depending on the material used for the fill, the
introduction of a large amount of water can cause considerable settlement
due to the collapse of the soil structure.

This tutorial describes a simplified model of a house that is part of the

Villa Trinidad subdivision north of San Diego. The subdivision was built
on 70 feet of fill and settlements of up to 12 inches were observed over a
ten year period. The case study is described in Brandon et al. (1990).

Defining the Model

Start the Settle3D program.

Project Settings
Open the Project Settings dialog from the Analysis menu. Make sure
the General tab is selected. Set the Stress units = Imperial, stress as ksf,
and the Settlement units = Inches.

Click on the Stages tab. Set the Number of Stages = 8.

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Click on the Groundwater tab. Select the Groundwater Analysis

checkbox.

Assigning Piezometric Lines

Select Groundwater > Add Piezometric Line. Enter a depth of 70 ft.
Click OK to close the Assign Piezometric Line to Soils dialog. Add more
piezometric lines using the same steps. Assign depths of 60, 50, 40, 30,
20, 10, and 0 ft.

Select Groundwater > Edit Piezometric Lines to open the Edit

Piezometric Lines dialog. The dialog should look as follows, and you
should have a total of 8 piezometric lines defined.

Click OK to close the dialog.

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Select Groundwater > Soil Groundwater Properties. Click on the

Stage Piezo Lines checkbox. Assign the piezo lines to each stage as
shown below.

Click on the Apply to All button, and click OK to close the dialog.

Soil Properties
We will assume the fill layer is placed on top of stiff rock, therefore we
will only model the fill layer. The fill is a compacted clayey sand. Select
Soil Properties from the Soils menu. Change the name of Material 1 to
Fill. Set the Unit Weight to 0.115 kips/ft3 and the Saturated Unit Weight
= 0.125 kips/ft3.

For this example, we will only consider hydroconsolidation settlement.

Turn OFF the Primary Consolidation checkbox, so that all settlement
types are disabled (immediate, primary, and secondary). The dialog
should look as follows.

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Click OK to close the dialog.

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Soil Layers
The thickness of the fill at this site is ~70 feet. Select Soil Layers from
the Soils menu. Change the thickness of the soil layer to 70 as shown.

Click OK to close the dialog.

Adding a Load
We will simulate building a house in Stage 1. From the Loads menu,
choose Add Rectangular Load. Set the length to 30 feet and the width
to 20. Leave all other values as default as shown.

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Click OK. Now enter the coordinates 0 0 in the prompt line at the bottom
right of the screen, to place the centre of the rectangular load at the 0,0
coordinate in the Plan View.

Click in the Plan View and select Zoom All (or press the F2 function key)
to center the load in the view.

The model should look as follows.

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Notice the water table at the bottom of the fill layer. Select the stage tabs
1 to 8, and you will see the water table rise in 10 foot increments to the
ground surface.

TIP: you can use the Page Down / Page Up keys to increase or decrease
the viewing stage.

Hydroconsolidation

Soil collapse, or hydroconsolidation, occurs when a loose clayey sand is

exposed to water and the clay bonds break causing significant volume
reduction. The amount of collapse depends on the stress. At very low
stresses, these soils may actually experience swelling.

To quantify the hydroconsolidation behaviour, it is common to perform a

series of oedometer tests in which the sample is loaded to a certain stress
state and then saturated. The change in void ratio (or strain) due to
wetting is then measured (see w in the figure below). From a series of
such tests, a curve of compaction versus stress can be created.

Alternatively, one could simply run two oedometer tests: one with dry
material and one with wet. The difference in the two curves can then be
used to get a curve of compaction versus stress (see w in the figure
below).

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Hydroconsolidation properties
A series of single oedometer tests were conducted on the fill material
from the Villa Trinidad site and strain changes due to wetting at
different stresses were measured. The results are shown in the figure
below with a best-fit curve drawn by eye.

0
% Strain

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

-2

-4

-6

-8
Stress (kpsf)

Axial strain due to wetting of fill material at different stresses. Data from
Brandon et al. (1990).

To enter this data in Settle3D, select Groundwater >

Hydroconsolidation Regions > Hydroconsolidation Properties.
Make sure the Fill tab is selected. Select the Consider
Hydroconsolidation checkbox. Here you can enter numbers to give the
relationship between amount of collapse (strain) and the applied pressure
usually obtained from laboratory testing. Relationships from published
literature can be found by clicking the property assist icon shown to the
left. You will see a table of possible soil types to choose from. Select
sandy-clay fill.

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Click OK and you will see the following chart:

Note that negative strain refers to swelling while positive strain refers to
compaction. Click OK to close the dialog.

Aside: For a non-linear material, you can enter changes in strain OR

changes in void ratio. For a linear material you can only enter changes in
strain because you do not specify an initial void ratio.

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Hydroconsolidation region
Hydroconsolidation occurs due to a localized increase in moisture content
possibly due to irrigation, raising of the water table, broken water pipes,
etc. The region over which this wetting occurs must be specified in
Settle3D.

Select Groundwater > Hydroconsolidation Regions > Add

Hydroconsolidation Region. In the dialog, click on the Wetting Stage
combo box, and choose the Use Water Table Only option. This means
that hydroconsolidation will only occur due to raising of the water table.
We will assume the entire fill depth is a collapsible soil, so leave the top
and bottom depth as 0 and 70.

Click OK to close the dialog. You now need to draw a polygon in the Plan
View to delineate the wetted region. We want to fully enclose the house so
you may need to zoom out (use the middle mouse wheel). Enter the
following coordinates to define the hydroconsolidation region:

20 15
-20 15
-20 -15
20 -15
c (for close)

The model should look like this.

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Computation and Results Visualization

To obtain results, we will add a point query to the center of the load.
Select Add Query Point from the Query menu. Leave the default
Automatic setting, and select OK in the dialog. Now click on the center
point of the load to add the query to the model.

Select Hydroconsolidation Settlement from the drop-list of data types in

the toolbar. Click on the stage tabs 1 to 8, and observe the progress of the
hydroconsolidation settlement, as the water table is raised. For stage 8
the results should look as follows.

Note that the maximum settlement is 13.45 inches, which is close to the
12 inches of settlement observed at the actual site. The discrepancy may
be due to several factors:

The entire depth of 70 feet may not have been wetted at the site.

The fill may not have become completely saturated at the site.

The best-fit line chosen to represent the strain versus stress

laboratory data may not be the best choice. The lab data showed
considerable scatter so it would probably be better to run two
models using upper and lower bound curves for the lab data to get
an estimate of maximum and minimum possible settlements (see
Brandon et al., 1990).

The lab data may not be perfectly representative of the soil

properties in-situ.

Nevertheless, Settle3D gives a reasonable estimation of settlement due to

hydroconsolidation at the site.

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Now lets graph the results. Right-click on the point query and select
Graph Query from the popup menu. Choose the Select All button to plot
all stages. Select OK.

You should see the following plot.

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This clearly illustrates the progress of the hydroconsolidation settlement

as the water table is raised. It is interesting to note that at the final
stage, near the ground surface, swelling occurs, rather than
consolidation, due to the low stress level (recall that the
hydroconsolidation curve for this material indicates negative strains at
low stress levels).

Further Analysis

To simplify this example, we turned OFF all other settlement types in the
Soil Properties dialog. Therefore the Total Settlement is equal to the
Hydroconsolidation settlement. You can verify this by viewing the Total
Settlement results.

For a collapsible soil, you can still define soil properties for immediate
settlement, primary or secondary consolidation. This allows you to
simultaneously analyze all modes of settlement. This is left as an optional
exercise to explore.

Finally, note that hydroconsolidation settlement can only occur ONCE for
a given material, the first time it is wetted. If the water table is raised,
lowered and then raised again, hydroconsolidation will only occur once.

This concludes the tutorial; you may now exit the Settle3D program.

References

Brandon, T.L., Duncan, J.M., Gardner, W.S., 1990. Hydrocompression

settlement of deep fills, Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, 116, 1536-
1548.

Settle3D v.3.0 Tutorial Manual