Numerical study on the effects of groundwater table oscillation beneath the “Palazzaccio” courthouse in Rome

Abstract

This work aims to evaluate the settlement induced by the river Tiber groundwater table oscillations. A representative section of the subsoil beneath the courthouse “Palazzaccio”, close to the river in the city centre of Rome, is analysed via the finite element method with a fully coupled hydro-mechanicalmodel. The effects of wetting-drying cycles induced by the water table oscillation are accounted for by adopting the Barcelona Basic Model for the unsaturated layers, whose model parameters are calibrated using experimental results on saturated and unsaturated samples and literature data. The variation of the river Tiber level is reconstructed according to the “Tevere – Ripetta” hydrometric station records between 2005 and 2008, and it is applied as a boundary condition at the boundary of the model domain.