Preliminary Design of Prefabricated Vertical Drains-Embedded Soft Soils in the Field: An Example

The paper presents a rough idea of preliminary design steps of designing prefabricated vertical drains-embedded soft soils in the field. In the past years, many researchers have exercised a number of analytical approaches, experimental works in the laboratory that are very laborious and time consuming or numerical analyses on PVD-embedded soils by taking into account several parameters such as horizontal and vertical coefficients of consolidations (ch and cv), horizontal and vertical coefficients of permeability (kh and kv), Over Consolidation Ratio (OCR), pore pressure, ‘n’ value (ratio of effective diameter and equivalent drain diameter of PVD) or other essential parameters associated with the design. But a thorough knowledge of the procedure of the prefabricated vertical drain design cannot be perceived or acquired from those analyses since a complete design step is out of the scope of their research. They do not provide design procedures in their publications. This may cause a fresh researcher to think very deeply about the design steps or it may take them long periods to acquire a complete idea of the PVD design procedure. So, in this paper an interpretation of the PVD design is made precisely with the help of an example that will provide an aggregate idea of the design of prefabricated vertical drains-embedded soft soils in the field, and thus, the paper may be helpful to the fresh researchers in the field of PVD.