Study on behaviour of fills during highway construction

Reinforced piled embankments has been gaining interest over the past years. The reason of this interest is, reinforced piled embankments significantly decrease load transfer to soft soil underneath the embankment. Due to this reason, observed settlements are decreased. Reinforced piled embankments have less maintenance cost compared with traditional embankment construction with vertical drains. In order to understand load transfer mechanism of reinforced piled embankments, finite element method is used in this study. Effects of different pile elasticities, different pile distances, different reinforcement stiffnesses, different number of reinforcement and placement patterns, different elasticity of embankment, different angle of friction of embankment, different thickness of working platform where reinforcement usually placed, different elasticity modulus of working platform, different angle of friction of working platform are used during the study in order to see their effects on the settlement of soft soil under the embankment, settlement of pile, stress acting on the pile cap, stress acting on the soil, settlement of the embankment crest on the center line and horizontal deformation of the embankment. Additionally, effect of traffic loading after the construction of embankment is tried to be evaluated.