Sustainable Practices in Mitigating Liquefaction-Induced Foundation Settlements: A Focus on Carbon Footprint Reduction During Sheet Pile Design-Paper

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This study evaluates partial floating sheet piles (PFS) as a lower-carbon alternative to full-length (FL) sheet piles for reducing earthquake-induced foundation settlement in liquefiable soils. Researchers conducted three 1g shake-table tests on a layered soil model: an untreated baseline, FL piles, and PFS piles.<br /><br />Both pile configurations reduced excess pore-water pressure beneath the foundation and substantially limited settlement and tilting. FL piles reduced settlement by 73%, while PFS piles achieved a 62.5% reduction. Foundation tilting fell by 98% with FL and 95% with PFS. PFS allowed water to pass through openings near the pile ends, leading to faster pore-pressure dissipation but somewhat greater settlement than with FL.<br /><br />The PFS configuration used 8.6% less material and produced 9.4% less estimated embodied carbon than FL. Carbon estimates covered only manufacturing stages A1–A3 (“cradle to gate”) and relied on flat-glass emissions data as a proxy for the acrylic sheets used in the experiments.<br /><br />Overall, PFS offers meaningful settlement and tilting control while modestly reducing material use and embodied carbon. Its performance was close to that of FL piles, though somewhat less effective at limiting settlement. The authors recommend further testing of different PFS embedment depths and other mitigation methods, as well as accounting for emissions across the full life cycle.

Keywords

partial floating sheet piles

full-length sheet piles

liquefiable soils

earthquake settlement

foundation tilting

shake-table tests

pore-water pressure

embodied carbon

lower-carbon alternative

material reduction