Modelling of consolidation in soft soils

Large stain formulation for two phase medium i.e. soil skeleton and ground water, is studied in the paper. The updated Lagrange procedure is developed for the fully coupled consolidation process. The pseudo-viscoplastic iteration procedure is applied to solve the large strain elasto-plastic consolidation problems. Changes of the permeability during pore closing process is studied in details. The equations are developed in the finite element code HYDRO-GEO. The rising of the embankment on the soft organic soils is modelled for the small and large strain analysis. The obtained results show that the variation of the permeability during deformation process is important and influences time of the consolidation process. The differences in the obtained results for small and large strains are reported. The large strain description should be taken into account especially where soft organic soils are located in the foundations.