Experimental investigation of lateral displacement of PVD-improved deposit

Laboratory model tests were conducted to investigate the effect of surcharge loading rate on the magnitude of lateral displacement of prefabricated vertical drains (PVDs) improved deposit. The test results indicate that under the condition that the system had sufficient factor of safety (FS) (FS >= 1.2), for the similar model ground under the same total applied surcharge load, the lateral displacement increases with the increase of loading rate. The test results have been used to check the validity of a previously proposed method for predicting the maximum lateral displacement, and it shows that the data points are around the middle line of the predicted range, which supports the usefulness of the proposed method. The basic idea of the prediction method is an empirical relationship between the normalized lateral displacement (NLD) and a ration of load to the undrained shear strength of the deposit (RLS). The model test results offer some modifications of the NLD-RLS relationship: (1) instead of a bilinear relationship, NLD-RLS relationship may be entirely nonlinear; (2) the upper bound value of RLS for the proposed method can be used may be limited to 2.1 instead of the originally proposed value of 3.0.