In-situ measurernent of pore-water pressure during construction of a road embankment

A new section of superhighway planned for a marshy area with poor bearing capacity required a special embankment filling process to prevent soil failure.

A new section of superhighway planned for a marshy area with poor bearing capacity required a special embankment filling process to prevent soil failure. Builders decided to monitor the consolidation process by measuring the pore-water pressure at the base of the embankment. This article describes the laboratory procedure used to determine characteristic values of soil strength and the resulting in-situ measurement of pore-water pressure.

The pressure-measuring probes operate with off-the-shelf absolute pressure transducers and are recoverable from the embankment base. A five-channel 225-Hz carrier-frequency amplifier was used in data acquisition.