الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 353 |  |  |
| | | from | 353 | | |
Abstract
Rigid Inclusions have been increasingly used as a successful technique for improving soft clay deposits. This technique was first introduced by Menard in the 1990s and is known commercially as Controlled Modulus Columns (CMC’s) (Coghlan et al. 2016). Unlike ordinary piles that transfer the entire external loads to the stiffer-bearing soil layers, rigid inclusions are mainly used to reduce the total and differential settlements by reducing the external loads transferred to the soft soil layers. One of the challenging tasks associated with this type of improvement is to estimate the ground deformations under different loading conditions reasonably. Previous research focused mainly on getting reliable estimates of the ground movements and the straining actions acting on the rigid inclusions; however, the importance of the installation effect on the predicted deformations and straining actions was not clearly considered.
The current research aims to develop a realistic approach that considers the installation effect of rigid inclusions by utilizing the cavity expansion approach to estimate the improvement in the surrounding soil properties and enhance the accuracy of estimating the deformations and the straining actions. The study also presents simplified charts developed based on more than 200 numerical models to detect the improvement factor, which implies the efficiency of the soil improvement technique with rigid inclusions system. The developed charts consider different inclusion diameters, inclusion lengths, soft soil thickness, and undrained shear strength of the soil. Seismic loading analyses are introduced to gain more insight into their effects on the rigid inclusions improvement technique and determine the additional straining actions due to seismic loading.