PROPOSAL THE SUITABLE STRUCTURE ON SMALL VESSEL AND BARGE IN THICK SOFT SOIL AREA IN THE GEOLOGICAL AREA OF TRA VINH PROVINCE, VIETNAM

Tra Vinh Province with its interlaced river system is convenient for navigation, especially for barges and small vessels under 1000 DWT. Geology in Tra Vinh primarily has a thick soft soil surface layer, averaging from 20 m – 40 m, even over 50 m in some places, structural solutions for docks in most regions choose piers. Thus, the high platform on the pile foundation. However, in practice, we found that most of the proposed wharf structure solutions for barges and small ships are not reasonable, the piles in the berth structure have not brought into full play their bearing capacity, leading to excessive and inefficient investment costs for large-scale projects. Within the scope of the paper, we propose a more reasonable wharf structure solution based on the integrated analysis of the geological features of the structure, the load due to the ship, and the operating loads on the berth.