Experimental Evaluation of the Deformational Calculation Method of Foundations for Overpasses of High-Speed Railways

One of the most important issues of the foundation design for overpasses of high-speed railways is consideration of soil strata heterogeneity (along the track line) influence on differential foundation soil settlements. The possibility of their limiting is directly related to the degree of conformity of predictable (calculated) and actual (obtained) values of foundation soil settlement. The purpose of the article is to optimality substantiation of using the predetermined soil settlement criterion (deformational calculation method) for the design of foundations for overpasses of high-speed railways, because this method allows decreasing the values of differential soil settlements to minimum. The following research tasks were solved: experimental studies on deformation of soil under the model of a shallow foundation (the model tests); comparison of experimentally measured and calculated soil settlements using the deformational calculation method and the numerical simulation; comparison of experimentally measured and calculated soil settlements using the proposed method and the most common approximate (“engineering”) methods; economic efficiency substantiation of the deformational calculation method. Based on the obtained results, the proposed method can be considered as promising for solving problems associated with the design of foundations for overpasses of high-speed railways.