When designing embankments over soft soils, geotechnical engineers face many challenges. These include potential bearing failure, intolerable settlement, and global or local instability. Pile-supported embankments have been emerged as an effective alternative successfully adopted worldwide to solve these problems. This paper focuses on three cases in which pile-supported embankments were used for constructing highways in the eastern coastal region of China. Each case provides a description of the soil profile, construction procedure, and field monitoring of the settlements, earth pressures, and pore-water pressures. Field monitored data from contact pressures acting on the piles and the soils, to the settlements of the piles and the soils are reported and discussed. The development of the earth pressures both on the piles and the soils shows that there was a significant soil arching in the embankment, and the measured earth pressures acting on the piles are much higher than that acting on the soils between the piles. The measured differential settlements between the piles and the soils are small. The pore-water pressures are not significant compared to the embankment loads. Most pore-water pressure dissipated after the complete of filling. The measurements have proven the effectiveness of this technique in reducing total and differential settlements. Finally, the available design standards and approaches are verified by three cases.

Shear wave velocity $\left(V_s\right)$ offers engineers a promising alternative tool to evaluate liquefaction resistance of sandy soils, and the lack of sufficient in-situ databases makes controlled laboratory study very important. In this study, semitheoretical considerations were first given based on review of previous liquefaction studies, which predicted a possible relationship between laboratory cyclic resistance ratio $\left({\mathit{CRR}}_{tx}\right)$ and $V_s$ normalized with respect to the minimum void ratio, confining stress and exponent $n$ of Hardin equation. Undrained cyclic triaxial tests were then performed on three reconstituted sands with $V_s$ measured by bender elements, which verified this soil-type-dependent relationship. Further investigation on similar laboratory studies resulted in a database of 291 sets of data from 34 types of sandy soils, based on which the correlation between liquefaction resistance and $V_s$ was established statistically and further converted to equivalent field conditions with well-defined parameters, revealing that $\mathit{CRR}$ will vary proportionally with ${\left(V_{s1}\right)}^4$ . Detailed comparisons with $V_s$ -based site-specific investigations show that the present lower-bound $\mathit{CRR}–V_{s1}$ curve is a reliable prediction especially for sites with higher $\mathit{CSR}$ or $V_{s1}$ . The framework of liquefaction assessment based on the present laboratory study is proposed for engineering practice.