Consolidated Drained Creep Model of Soft Clay in Tianjin Coastal Areas

Abstract

The research conducted one-dimensional consolidation creep experiment for the marine soft soil in Tianjin to study the non-linear creep characteristics of soft clay there. The creep experiment was conducted in the mode of graded loading and adopted “Chen’s method” to process the measured data to get strain-time curve. The Merchant model was used to fit the strain-time curve to define model parameters and establish the relation between Merchant model parameters E0, E1, η1 and stress level. The non-linear creep model applicable to typical soft clay in coastal area in Tianjin was suggested to reveal the rule that the three parameters in the model approximately increase linearly with increase of stress level. Then based on this, the research established tridimensional non-linear viscoelasticity creep constitutive model reflecting time effect for marine soft soil in Tianjin and developed finite element subprogram, which produce result consistent with experimental data.