Mohammad Reza Motahari - Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Arak University, Arak, Iran.
Hadith Kiani vafa - Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Arak University, Arak, Iran.

The main problem with saturated fine-grained soils is the slowness of consolidation procedure and the occurrence of large soil settlements. Generally, to expedite consolidation procedure, preloading method would be used along with prefabricated vertical drains. Soil improvement process under this condition would be subjected to design method and vertical drains’ modeling. In the current paper and to understand the consolidation behavior of clayey soils improved with vertical drains, a parametric study has been performed by PLAXIS 2D finite element software. The results are indicative of an increase in average consolidation degree from 74 to 84% after a period of 6 months through the reduction of vertical drains’ distances from 4.5 to 1.5m. Moreover, it became clear that an increase would be made in the rate of settlement, consolidation, and dissipation of excess pore water pressure through increase made in length and diameter of vertical drains and increase of their discharge capacity. Also, it became specified that increase of diameter is less effective on the expedition of consolidation procedure compared to that of distance reduction among drains.

Soil Improvement, Prefabricated vertical drain, Radial consolidation, plaxis 2d, Preloading