Discharge capacity of vertical drain is one of the important factors of prefabricated vertical drain (PVD), which affects consolidation rate of PVD-improved ground. Both previous experimental tests and field behaviors indicated that the discharge capacity of PVD decreases with increase in lateral effec-tive stress. In order to consider varied discharge capacity with depth, an axisymmetric unit cell solution of PVD-improved soil deposit with considering a nonlinear variation of the discharge capacity was devel-oped based on the Hansbo’solution. The results of excess pore water pressure distribution and degree of consolidation with depth were presented and compared to other approaches. The proposed analytical solu-tion of consolidation of PVD-installed soil deposit considering the nonlinear distribution of discharge ca-pacity of PVD was verified via a finite element method (FEM) in plane strain model. The results of the consolidation behaviors in FEM with the nonlinear distribution of discharge capacity of PVD provided a good agreement with the observed data. The proposed solution is recommended as a simple method to es-timate the consolidation behavior of PVD-installed soil deposit with considering the discharge capacity variation.
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