Stability analysis of large-scale waste mounds with respect to consolidation effect

Industrial and construction wastes are often stored and heaped up in a large-scale mound on the storage yard. The load generated to the foundation soil tends to be wide in area, long term in duration and high in intensity which requires higher bearing capacity of foundation soil. The step loaded surcharge preloading method is often adopted to consolidate the foundation soils and thus improve their engineering properties. To reasonably evaluate the stability of the foundation soils, the consolidation effect is therefore required to be considered when estimating the increased bearing capacity of the foundation soil. The stress path method is adopted in this paper to calculate the strength development of the foundation soil during the consolidation process. An analytical method was proposed to estimate the bearing capacity of the foundation with respect to consolidation effect. FEM analysis was used to verify the reasonability and validity of the proposed method. Two case studies were also conducted to verify the accuracy of the method. The safety factors obtained by the proposed method could be used to indicate the possibility of failure coinciding with field observations. The proposed method was therefore recommended to be used to predict the stability of the similar engineering projects.