Grouting below the tunnel invert is commonly used to remediate the settlement. Case histories demonstrate that the tunnel settlement still develops after the grouting is completed, especially in structured clay. The principal mechanism behind this is the grouting-induced soil disturbance, including the generation of excess-pore-water pressure (EPWP), degradation in soil structure, and changes in compressibility. To date, the mechanism behind the grouting-induced soil disturbance and responses of the ground heave is not yet fully understood. Toward this end, laboratory tests on grouting in mud with different sand content are carried out. Earth pressure, pore water pressure, shear stiffness, undrained shear strength, and ground heave are measured and analyzed. The results indicate that grouting causes increases in the lateral earth pressure and significant EPWP in the surrounding soil. Changes in undrained shear strength and shear stiffness are closely related to the comprehensive effects of increases in stress level and shear disturbance. The increased stress level leads to the growth in stiffness and strength, while shear disturbance causes degradation. The soils right nearby the grouting zone are subjected to significant shear disturbance and also increases in stress level. As a result, the soil stiffness and strength exhibit negligible change. In comparison, the soils above and below the grouting zone mainly experience an increase in stiffness and strength, because shear disturbance is comparatively smaller than the influence of the increases in stress level. Furthermore, the development of the vertical displacement of the ground surface demonstrates two stages of initial uplift during grouting and then settlement after the grouting is completed. In addition, stronger soil structure corresponds to larger settlement after the grouting is completed.

Marine soft clays are known for their poor engineering properties, which, when subjected to prolonged static and dynamic loading, can lead to excessive settlement of offshore pile foundations and subsequent structural instability, resulting in frequent engineering failures. This study examines the bearing and deformation behavior of jacked piles in these clay deposits under both static and cyclic loading conditions using a custom-designed model testing apparatus. Emphasizing the time-dependent load-carrying capacity and accumulated cyclic settlement of piles, the research uses artificially structured clay to more accurately simulate stratum conditions than traditional severely disturbed natural clays. Model pile testing was carried out to analyze the effects of soil structure and cyclic loading patterns on the long-term response of jacked piles. Key factors investigated include initial soil structure, pile jacking-induced destruction, soil reconsolidation post-installation, disturbed clay's thixotropic effects, and cyclic loading's impact during service. Results show that increasing the cement content within the clays from 0 % to 4 % nearly doubled pile penetration resistance, led to a more significant accumulation of excess pore water pressure (EPWP), and accelerated its dissipation rate. Additionally, the ultimate load-carrying capacity of jacked piles also doubled. Higher cement content slowed pile head settlement rates and reduced stable cumulative settlement values, requiring more cycles to reach instability. Under high-amplitude, low-frequency cyclic loads, hysteresis loops of the model piles became more pronounced and rapid. This study enhances understanding of the long-term cyclic behavior of jacked piles in soft soils, providing valuable insights for designing offshore piles.

In the Niigata-ken Chuetsu-oki Earthquake of 2007, ground liquefaction was outstanding at the foot of a sand dune and in old river channels. Although no distinct disaster was found in the clayey ground after the earthquake, the long-term settlement of the ground was observed after the earthquake in the Shinbashi district of Kashiwazaki City. At one observation site, the cumulated ground subsidence of the layers from the ground surface to a depth of 23 m had reached 71 mm 14 years after the earthquake. In order to study the mechanism of the deformation during the earthquake and the long-term settlement after the earthquake, ground investigations, such as a boring survey at the observation site and indoor element tests on sampled soil, were conducted in this study. The results showed that the sampled soil was very soft, strongly compressible, and relatively highly structured. Subsequently, the transformation stress-cyclic mobility (TS-CM) constitutive model, developed by Zhang et al. (2007), was used to simulate the results of the indoor element tests, and the soil parameters were determined based on the results of these tests. The TS-CM model contains the concepts of subloading, described by Hashiguchi (1977), and superloading, described by Asaoka et al. (2002). Therefore, the subsidence behavior of the ground was simulated by a soil-water coupling elasto-plastic finite element (FE) analysis using the TS-CM constitutive model and the determined parameters. The FE simulation results agreed well with the actual site subsidence observation data. Based on the simulation results, the post- earthquake behavior of the soft clay and its mechanism were discussed, and the successive subsidence was predicted forward. According to the simulation results, the relatively highly structured susceptible clay at this site was found to have greater potential in terms of longterm consolidation than relatively less structured susceptible clay due to the large excess pore water pressure generation during the ground motion and the consolidation process after the earthquake. This conclusion was verified by consolidation tests on two types of clay. (c) 2024 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Japanese Geotechnical Society. This is an open access article under the CC BY- NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Laboratory model tests were conducted on artificially structured clays using self-developed equipment to better understand the penetration mechanism of jacked piles in structured clays. Two artificially structured clays with the same initial void ratio but different structured strengths, along with one unstructured clay, served as foundation soils for model tests. Cement and salt were selected to simulate the bonding force and macroporous fabric between soil particles in artificially structured clays. The microstructure and mechanical behavior of artificially structured clay samples were analyzed using a scanning electron microscope and a triaxial apparatus. This analysis aimed to evaluate the efficacy of the current method utilized in preparing structured clays and elucidate the evolution mechanism of pile response in structured clays in relation to soil cells. The findings showed that increased confining pressures lead to a more pronounced impact of soil structure on pile jacking force. Unlike the pile shaft, soil structure played a more crucial role in influencing the pile end during jacking, primarily due to the shear-induced structure degradation of clays close to the pile shaft. The axial force and shaft resistance of piles significantly increased with higher cement content. Simultaneously, the mobilization of the increased pile shaft resistance enhanced the nonlinearity in the distribution of axial force along the pile shaft. The pore-water pressure and total radial stress at the pile-soil interface, located 150 mm from the pile toe, experienced respective increases of 1.27 and 1.38 times as the cement content of model soils increased from 0% to 4%.

A thermodynamic constitutive model for structured and destructured clays is proposed in this paper based on thermodynamic principles on the energy storages and dissipations. The model includes state-dependent relations of hyperelasticity and plasticity without the concept of yielding surface. The proposed nonlinear hyperelasticity is dependent on the sates of soil stress, density, and structure and leads to the limit state surface that varies with the bonding structure from a curved surface for structured clays to a plane surface for destructured clays. The plastic and destructure laws are subjected to the second thermodynamic law and expressed in the elastic-strain space instead of the stress space, which naturally account for the couplings between elasticity and plasticity with the Lode-angle and structure effects. The model is well validated by the predictions of drained/undrained conventional and true triaxial shearing tests for both structured and destructured clays, which well capture the K0 effect, the non-coaxiality between stress and strain, and the structure/destructure effects on the elasticstiffness and strain-softening of clays. For both structured and destructured clays, the critical-state elastic strain is unique under a fixed Lode angle and hence the critical state only relies on the critical-state density and the direction of shearing path.