Soil arching has important influence on the behavior of piled embankments. How to calculate stress concentration ratio is of great concern when designing embankment over soft soils reinforced by rigid concrete piles. A numerical analysis by using a commercial FEM program was conducted to reveal the mechanism of soil arching in piled embankments. And also, the influence of embankment height, pile-soil relative displacement, cohesion and internal friction angle on the equal settlement plane was evaluated. The results indicate that the stress concentration ratio varies with the pile-subsoil relative displacement and has upper and lower bound value. The effect of pile-soil displacement and the strength parameters of embankment material on the equal settlement plane can be neglected. It was also found that the equal settlement plane height is equal to 1.6 times the pile-cap clear spacing. When the ratio of embankment height to the pile-cap clear spacing is greater than 1.6, no apparent differential settlement will occur on the embankment surface.
Similitude Conditions Modeling Geosynthetic-Reinforced Piled Embankments Using FEM and FDM Techniques