Introduction

In the 1970’s, a series of test embankments were constructed on soft clay at Cubzac-les-Ponts in France. These full-scale field tests were well-instrumented and are well-documented, and consequently provide an excellent case history. Two of the embankments are the subject of this example. Embankment A was built rapidly to failure to find the limiting height. Embankment B was later constructed to a lower height, to study the long term, time-dependent consolidation of the soft foundation clay.

The purpose here is to demonstrate that GeoStudio has the features and capability to numerically simulate the deformations and stability of such embankments using a fully coupled effective stress/pore-water pressure type of analysis. There are many publications describing the tests, analyses and experiments carried out at Cubzac-les-Ponts. The data used to develop the analyses here was extracted from the books written by Wood (1990) and Leroueil et al. (1990). The rest of this article refers to these authors as the Researchers.