• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.1268-1277
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• 2008

Recently, the high speed railway comes into the spotlight as the important and convenient traffic infrastructure. In Korea, Kyung-Bu high speed train service began in about 400km section at 2004, and the Ho-Nam high speed railway will be constructed by 2017. The high speed train will run with a design maximum speed of 300-350km/hr. Since the trains are operated at high speed, the differential settlement of subgrade under the rail is able to cause a fatal disaster. Therefore, the differential settlement of the embankment must be controlled with the greatest care. Furthermore, the characteristics and causes of settlements which occurred under construction and post-construction should be investigated. A considerable number of studies have been conducted on the settlement of the natural ground over the past several decades. But little attention has been given to the compression settlement of the embankment. The long-term settlement of compacted fills embankments is greatly influenced by the post-construction wetting. This is called 'hydro collapse' or 'wetting collapse'. This wetting collapse problem for the compressibility of compacted sands, gravels and rockfills, has been recognized by several researchers. For this wetting settlement problem, we showed the test results carried out with 4 fill materials. These tests were performed under the condition that the fill materials were inundated at the first wetting. Subsequently, in this study, we investigated the long-term settlement characteristics of the fill materials under the repeated partial wetting and rising of the ground water table happend by rainfall.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.27 no.11
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• pp.55-69
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• 2011

The importance of unsaturated state in various geo-engineering problems has led to the advance of mechanical constitutive model emulating behavior of unsaturated soils in response to thermo-hydro-mechanical loading. Elasto-plastic mechanical constitutive model for unsaturated soil is formulated based on Bishop's effective stress. Effective stress and temperature are main variables in constitutive equation, and incremental formulation of constitutive relationship is derived to compute stress update and stiffness tensor. Numerical simulations involving coupled THM processes are conducted to discuss numerical stability and applicability of developed constitutive model: one-dimensional test, tri-axial compression test, and clay-buffering at high level radioactive waste disposal. Numerical results demonstrated that developed model can predict very complex behavior of coupled THM phenomena and is applicable to geo-engineering problems under various environmental conditions, as well as interpret typical behavior of unsaturated soils.