POTENTIAL CONSOLIDATION SETTLEMENT DUE TO LOAD STRESSES OF BUILDING STRUCTURES

Semarang is a capital city of Central Java province in Indonesia, in which mostly dominated by large lowlands at coastal areas that formed by alluvial fan and flood-plain of thick clayey soil as Quaternary deposits. The thick clayey soils deposits encountered in the coastal areas are having a high compressibility behavior and categorized as normally consolidated clays. Presence of building structures for public facilities, heavy industry, residential areas, and the other infrastructures subsequently accelerates consolidation settlement in a large part of the northern Semarang city. This research is intended to reveal rates of potential consolidation settlements due to load stresses impact of building structures by means of one-dimensional settlement calculation method based on the compressible features of the clayey soils. The settlement phenomenon is extensively caused by the presence of voids in the soil structure that contributing to the existence of compression index (Cc), the thickness of the compressible clayey soils, and surcharges load of building structures. By simplifying the surcharge load model of the light structure about 15 kPa, then for medium and heavy structure about 35 and 60 kPa, hence the potential consolidation settlement of light, medium, and heavy structures are about 1.42, 2.90, and 4.38 cm, respectively.