A Constitutive Model for Locally Drained Shear Bands in Globally Undrained Dense Sand

Abstract

When saturated granular materials which are dilative in nature are subjected to the undrained deformation, their strength increases due to the generation of negative excess pore pressure. This phenomenon is known as dilative hardening and can be witnessed in saturated dense sand or rocks during very fast loading. However, experimental evidence of undrained biaxial compression tests of dense sand shows a limit to this dilative hardening due to the formation of shear bands. There is no consensus in the literature about the mechanism which triggers these shear bands in the dense dilative sand under isochoric constraint. The possible theoretical reasoning is the local drainage inside the specimen under the globally undrained condition, which is challenging to be monitored experimentally. Hence, both incept of localisation and post-bifurcation of the saturated undrained dense sand demand further numerical investigation. Pathological mesh dependency hinders the ability of the finite element method to represent the localisation without advanced regularisation methods. This paper attempt to provide a macroscopic constitutive behaviour of the undrained deformation of the saturated dense sand in the presence of a locally drained shear band. Discontinuation of dilatant hardening due to partial drainage between the shear band and the adjacent material is integrated into the constitutive model without changing governing equilibrium equations. Initially, a classical bifurcation analysis is conducted to detect the inception and inclination of the shear band based on the underlying drained deformation. Then a post-bifurcation analysis is carried out assuming an embedded drained or partially drained shear band at gauss points which satisfy bifurcation criterion. The smeared shear band approach is utilised to homogenise the constitutive relationship. It is observed that the dilatant hardening in the saturated undrained dense sand is reduced considerably due to the formation of shear bands.