- Title
- On the estimation of scale of fluctuation in geostatistics
- Creator
- Lloret-Cabot, M.; Fenton, G. A.; Hicks, M. A.
- Relation
- Georisk Vol. 8, Issue 2, p. 129-140
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17499518.2013.871189
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- Describing how soil properties vary spatially is of particular importance in stochastic analyses of geotechnical problems, because spatial variability has a significant influence on local material and global geotechnical response. In particular, the scale of fluctuation θ is a key parameter in the correlation model used to represent the spatial variability of a site through a random field. It is, therefore, of fundamental importance to accurately estimate θ in order to best model the actual soil heterogeneity. In this paper, two methodologies are investigated to assess their abilities to estimate the vertical and horizontal scales of fluctuation of a particular site using in situ cone penetration test (CPT) data. The first method belongs to the family of more traditional approaches, which are based on best fitting a theoretical correlation model to available CPT data. The second method involves a new strategy which combines information from conditional random fields with the traditional approach. Both methods are applied to a case study involving the estimation of θ at three two-dimensional sections across a site and the results obtained show general agreement between the two methods, suggesting a similar level of accuracy between the new and traditional approaches. However, in order to further assess the relative accuracy of estimates provided by each method, a second numerical analysis is proposed. The results confirm the general consistency observed in the case study calculations, particularly in the vertical direction where a large amount of data are available. Interestingly, for the horizontal direction, where data are typically scarce, some additional improvement in terms of relative error is obtained with the new approach. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.
- Subject
- spatial variability; random fields; soil heterogeneity; characterisation of soil/rock variability; geostatistics
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1307112
- Identifier
- uon:21335
- Identifier
- ISSN:1749-9518
- Language
- eng
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