Piezometric Lines

In Settle3, the in-situ groundwater pore pressure can be defined using one or more piezometric lines, and these piezo lines can be staged (i.e. the water level can be raised or lowered at different stages or times).

To define a Piezometric Line:

1. Select Groundwater > Add Piezometric Line
2. In the dialog that appears, enter the depth of the water table, and press Enter or click OK to close the dialog.
3. The Add Piezometric Line dialog will close and the Assign Piezometric Line to Soils dialog will open.
4. Select the materials that you want to assign the piezometric line to. You can use the Select All button to quickly assign the piezo line to all materials.
5. Click OK to close the dialog.

Edit Piezometric Lines

To view and edit all the piezometric lines that have been created, select Edit Piezometric Lines from the Groundwater menu. The Edit Piezometric Lines dialog will pop up, and will list all of the piezometric lines. Any of these can be deleted or edited.

Excavation Below Water Table

When an excavation is added that extends below the water table, the water table is locally dropped to the bottom of the excavation. This is to ensure that the excavation is dry and not full of water. Query points inside the excavation will see a drop in pore water pressure. Query points outside of the excavation are unaffected by the drop in the water table.

This approach tends to overestimate the settlement (it gives a conservative answer), compared with what would be observed for a true three-dimensional groundwater analysis, since this approach does not account for horizontal water flow from areas of higher pressure (outside of the excavation) to areas of lower pressure (under the excavation).