Numerical analysis of integral pavement/soil-wall structures in soft soil

In a country like the Netherlands, construction on weak and quite often wet soils is inevitable. The interaction between the pavement and the underlying foundation is then crucial to the overall construction performances. Focusing on this requirement, this contribution took an integrated approach in the analysis, including the development and implementation of constitutive models to capture the porosity and nonlinearity of materials and contact elements to simulate sophisticated contact conditions between the structure and the bounding soil. Furthermore, the three-dimensional complexity of the structure was taken into account by the implementation of a 3D finite element mesh representing the real structure. The responses of the structure and the corresponding influencing factors were discussed.