Effectiveness of CFG pile-slab structure on soft soil for supporting high-speed railway embankment

The use of cement-fly ash-gravel (CFG) pile-slab structures is a new effective technique for reducing the settlements of soft foundations in China. A comprehensive research was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of a CFG pile-slab structure-supported embankment of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway in China. Firstly, an analytical method was formulated to calculate the settlements of the CFG pile-slab structure-supported embankment. Secondly, mechanical scaling laws were derived for the proposed testing plan at model scale. Model tests were conducted to quantify and to interpret the settlement distributions. Thirdly, the influence of three key factors (pile length, pile diameter, and slab thickness) for the structural form of the CFG pile-slab structure-supported embankment on the settlement distribution were studied using numerical simulations. The maximum settlements of the CFG pile-slab structure-supported embankment in optimizing the structural form were obtained using the above three research methods and then they were compared with each other. The results show that (1) the settlements obtained by the analytical method, the physical model tests, and the numerical simulations showed good concordance with each other; (2) the settlement-controlling effect of the CFG pile-slab structure was able to meet the requirements of high-speed railway construction; (3) the piles and the soil-bearing capacities of the CFG pile-slab structure-supporting embankment could be fully mobilized because of the “load re-distribution” function of the slab; and (4) the affected area of the engineering load had a depth of more than 18.75 m and a horizontal length of 7.5 m near the toe of the embankment slope.