Improving the pressuremeter approach for settlement calculation under high-speed railway embankments
Résumé
Consolidation settlement under embankment is often calculated using the oedometric approach. However, engineers tend to conduct these calculations in clays based on in situ test results including the pressuremeter measurements. The pressuremeter method is based on Menard's coefficient, enabling to switch from the pressuremeter modulus to the oedometric one. This relationship has demonstrated certain success when estimating consolidation settlements within some stress domain. This paper addresses improvements of this method for settlement calculation in overconsolidated terrain. For this purpose, the authors suggest two expressions for the rheological coefficient based on back-calculation together with a linear and non-linear multiple regression. Implementing this proposal for real cases highlights the interest and significance of this study. The authors have also established an adjusting coefficient to be introduced as part of the common pressuremeter settlement expression for approximating the measured values on site.