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Abstract This paper investigates the consolidation behavior of multi‐layered viscoelastic soils considering groundwater. First, the fractional Merchant viscoelastic model is introduced to describe the behavior of multi‐layered viscoelastic soils considering groundwater. Later, the governing equations are extended to a viscoelastic medium by virtue of the elastic‐viscoelastic corresponding principle in the Laplace–Hankel domain. According to the extended precise integration method, the soil layer is divided into a series of layer units. Then the relationship between general stress vector and general displacement vector on the top and bottom planes is established. Every two adjacent layer units are combined into one layer in each computational iteration. The solutions in the Laplace–Hankel domain are obtained by considering the boundary conditions, and numerical inversion is performed to obtain the solutions in the physical domain. The practicability of the present method is assessed by comparing the numerical results with those in the existing literature and done by ABAQUS. Finally, the effects of groundwater table, properties of the soils above groundwater table, load depth, viscoelastic parameters, and soil stratification are investigated.
Ai et al. (Wed,) studied this question.