Lateral displacements due to installation of soil-cement columns

A method for predicting the lateral displacement of the ground induced by the installation of soil-cement columns is briefly summarized and then applied to two field tests conducted in Japan in the 1990s. The prediction method was developed by Chai et al. in 2009 using cavity expansion theory. This method can consider explicitly the effect of the amount of injected admixture and the stiffness and strength of the deposit as well as empirically account for the construction method. The two field tests were conducted at two different sites where, in each case, sandy layers exist at the ground surface underlain by a clayey layer, which in turn is underlain by another sandy layer. A comparison of the predicted and measured lateral displacement profiles indicates that the calculation method under-estimated the lateral displacement of the clayey layers but generally over-estimated the displacements of the sandy layers in cases where the volumetric strain (Δ) of the soil was assumed to be zero. When it was assumed that Δ = 2% in the sandy layers, the calculated values of lateral displacement provide a good match to the measured data for the sandy surface layer, which indicates that during the column installation process, the soil may deform under conditions of partial drainage.