Abstract
Fabric anisotropy has a significant influence on the mechanical behavior of sand. An anisotropic plasticity model incorporating fabric evolution is formulated in this study. Information on the overall stress–strain relationship and micromechanical fabric states from DEM numerical tests is used in the development of the constitutive model, overcoming the difficulties of fabric measurement in physical tests. The framework of the model and its formulations for fabric evolution, plasticity, and dilatancy enables it to capture the strength, shear modulus, and dilatancy of sand under both monotonic and cyclic loading. The model is validated against DEM numerical tests and physical laboratory tests on samples with different initial fabric, showing good agreement between the simulation and test results for the anisotropic stress–strain behavior of sand. The use of DEM test data also allows for the validation of the model on the micromechanical fabric level, showing that the model can reproduce the fabric evolution and its influence on key constitutive features reasonably well. The model is further applied to analyze the liquefaction behavior of sand, exhibiting the significant influence of fabric anisotropy on both liquefaction resistance and postliquefaction shear deformation.
Highlights
Anisotropy has long been acknowledged to be a salient feature of sand [8]
The proposed model builds on an isotropic model that can achieve a unified description of sand of different conditions from pre- to postliquefaction under both monotonic and cyclic loading
A normalized fabric tensor and its evolution rule are introduced in the model
Summary
Anisotropy has long been acknowledged to be a salient feature of sand [8]. Sand deposited under gravity or subjected to anisotropic stress inevitably exhibits anisotropy in strength and deformation (e.g., [1, 3, 42, 61, 77, 79, 80]). This study aims to develop a plasticity model incorporating fabric evolution for monotonic and cyclic sand behavior and utilizes quantitative micromechanical information obtained through DEM numerical tests in the development and validation of the continuum-based constitutive model. Based on these understandings, the detailed multiaxial formulation of the proposed model is presented in Sect. 4, the model is validated for both macrolevel stress–strain relationships and microlevel fabric evolution against DEM numerical and laboratory physical test data and is used to analyze the influence of fabric anisotropy on the liquefaction behavior of sand. Tensors are denoted by bold letters to distinguish them from plain scalars
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