Geosynthetic Reinforced Containment Dike Constructed over Soft Foundation: Numerical Analysis - Reinforced Soil Engineering: Advances in Research and Practice - page 276

Figure 1 Location of Wilmington Harbor South disposal site.
geotextile and wick drains, were adopted to improve the performance of the dike
and its foundation. Wick drains were installed to accelerate consolidation. The
dike was constructed in several phases and was instrumented to monitor the
performance during the period of construction and also after construction. It was
hoped that the results of this instrumentation would provide valuable information
for future construction of similar structures.
In order to solve the sophisticated initial-boundary-value problem, an
anisotropic bounding surface model (Yue, 2001; Ling et al., 2002) was
incorporated into a two-dimensional finite-element program (SAC-2, Herrmann
and Kaliakin, 1987) for the analysis. SAC-2 utilizes a coupled stress-flow
analysis based on Biot's theory. It has been used for geotechnical analysis of
similar problems (such as Poran et al., 1988; Kaliakin et al., 1990). A set of
comprehensive field results was compared with the results obtained from
numerical prediction.
2 FOUNDATION AND SOIL PROPERTIES
Figure 2 shows a typical cross section of the containment dike and associated
foundation profile. It was identified based on the boring logs and laboratory soil
testings conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE, 1985) and