PLAXIS 3D Tutorial 04: Construction of a road embankment

The construction of an embankment on soft soil with a high groundwater level leads to an increase in pore pressure. As a result of this undrained behaviour, the effective stress remains low and intermediate consolidation periods have to be adopted in order to construct the embankment safely. During consolidation the excess pore pressures dissipate so that the soil can obtain the necessary shear strength to continue the construction process.

This tutorial concerns the construction of a road embankment in which the mechanism described above is analysed in detail. In the analysis two new calculation options are introduced, namely a consolidation analysis and the calculation of a safety factor by means of a safety analysis (phi/c-reduction). It also involves the modelling of drains to speed up the consolidation process.

The attached *.p3dlog file contains all the commands to generate the models up to calculation (without point for curves selection). With a Bentley Geotechnical SELECT Entitlement [GSE] (former PLAXIS-VIP) licence you can use the commands runner to open the *.p3dlog file and to execute all commands in one go. Without a VIP licence, you can open the *.p3dlog file with any text editor, like Notepad, and then execute the commands via the command line command by command.