Verification of a Macroelement Method with Water Absorption and Discharge Functions in Quasi-Static Problems

Abstract

When simulating the vertical drain method using a soil–water coupled finite-element analysis, we the macroelement method can be adopted to provide the water absorption function of drains to individual elements approximately. A previous study added the discharge function of vertical drains to the technique so that the occurrence of well resistance can be considered in accordance with its mechanism. This paper verified the approximation accuracy of this new macroelement method in quasi-static problems. The macroelement method was derived under the assumption that the axisymmetric pore water pressure distribution is equal Barron’s solution, but the first numerical example demonstrated that the technique has high approximation accuracy even for nonaxisymmetric problems by appropriately converting the permeability of a drain. The second calculation example included a number of drains and applied the vacuum consolidation method to clayey ground containing a middle sand layer. In this calculation, there was remarkable well resistance, and pore water flowed from the unimproved region to the improved region or between the effective areas of each drain. The calculation results indicated the superiority of the new macroelement method in terms of accurate approximations even for such a complex problem. Moreover, this study demonstrated the effectiveness of waterproof sealing, a countermeasure for sucking pore water from the middle sand layer, using the new macroelement method.