Abstract
The soil-water characteristic surface model plays an essential part in predicting the hydraulic behaviour of unsaturated soils. Based on the theory of plasticity bounding surface, this paper presents a three-dimensional soil-water characteristic surface model considering the effects of deformation and hysteresis. Suction and void ratio are adopted as independent variables, while the degree of saturation is adopted as a dependent variable. A new mapping rule is used where the distance between the current position and its image point can be calculated as a difference in the degree of saturation axis. The model is verified by comparing with drying-wetting tests on bentonite/kaolin mix and pearl clay. The efficiency of the proposed model is proven by validation tests.
Highlights
Soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC) is adopted to represent the relationship between water content and suction of unsaturated soils
This paper focuses on the variation of soil-water characteristic curve instead of the deformation of solid phase, which means only impacts of the deformation of solid phase on the SWCC is considered
It is assumed that the increment of degree of saturation surface can be obtained: (Sr) can be separated into two parts: (1) the increment of Sr triggered by the change of suction s, which considers hysteresis and can be observed in the Sr:s plane; (2) the increment of Sr brought by the change of void ratio e, which considers deformation and can be observed in the e:Sr plane
Summary
Soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC) is adopted to represent the relationship between water content and suction of unsaturated soils. Salager performed drying tests on five samples of clayey silt with distinctive initial void ratios and established a threedimensional main drying surface in the w:s:e space on the basis of Fredlund & Xing model[20] According to these academic achievements, it is obvious that enormous development of SWCC models considering deformation has been achieved. These papers mentioned above all consider the impact of deformation and hysteresis, none of them refers to the path and shape of the scanning curve in the three-dimensional space, and the validation of these models is merely conducted in a twodimensional projection plane instead of intuitively presenting true paths of the main drying/wetting curve and the scanning curve under the control of void ratio. The model prediction is compared with published experimental results of pearl clay for validation
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