Settlement Prediction of Stone Column Group

Abstract

Stone columns can be designed to bear on the hard stratum or as a floating system where the toe is embedded in the soft layer. Most of the existing design methods for stone columns adopt unit cell idealization which is not applicable to spread footing. From the view of settlement analyses, current available methods to evaluate the settlement performance of a footing on a limited number of stone columns are more or less rough approximations derived from the elastic theory or using simple empirical approach. None of these methods incorporate the idea of optimum length and the yielding effect in the plastic zone. This paper introduces a new mechanical method to account for these. This method works for homogenous and non-homogenous ground condition. The settlement predictions made by the proposed method are compared with the finite elements results and field measurement. Good agreements are obtained not only for load settlement response but also the displacement profile.