doi:10.3850/GI133

ABSTRACT

A new Northern Access Road (NAR) is proposed by Brisbane Airport Corporation (BAC) to link the new duplicated Gateway Motorway to the Brisbane Domestic Airport that is located to the north of the existing Airport Drive on a currently undeveloped area.

In order to expedite the design and construction process, it was decided at a very initial stage to design and construct a 500m long trial embankment within the West Area - W2. This trial embankment was to form part of the final embankment. The purpose of this trial embankment was to enable observation of the foundation response upon loading, evaluate the effectiveness of proposed ground improvement techniques and increase the confidence of the adopted design parameters for the compressible soils etc.

The trial embankment area is located in an undeveloped land to the northwest of the existing airport drive. The site is generally level with a general RL of around 2.6m AD. The proposed works in this area involve the construction of a trial embankment between MC10 CH10800 and MC11300. The width of the trial embankment is approximately 40m. The height of the embankment varies from approximately 2.1m to 2.9m with an average value of about 2.6m. This paper discusses the design and the performance review of this trial embankment between MC10 CH 10800 and CH11100.

It should be noted that although the term “surcharge” is technically more appropriate for defining additional fill that is over and above the design height of an embankment, the term “preload” has been used throughout this paper to remain consistent with the terminology adopted in the project.

© 2010 by Geotechnical Society of Singapore (GeoSS)