ABSTRACT
In soft clays, a cone factor Nkt is typically adopted to correlate net cone tip resistance qt with undrained shear strength Su . Many existing numerical studies on the estimation of Nkt are performed using analyses in homogeneous soil medium. However, soil properties exhibit spatial variability under real field conditions. In this study, the effects of spatial variability on the interpretation of CPT data were investigated using a finite element analysis technique, namely the Press-Replace method (PRM). This method, which can capture installation effects arising from the penetration of a piezocone, was implemented with the soil domain modelled as anisotropic random fields. Using a pre-determined Nkt , statistics of Su were back-calculated using the qt profiles obtained from different random field realizations. Comparisons of the back-calculated statistics with the true statistics used to generate the random fields revealed that the true statistics may not be fully recovered from the CPT data.
