Controllability Criteria for Soils Saturated by a Compressible Fluid

Abstract

AbstractThe liquefaction of sediments with gas bubbles occluded in the pore fluid can be studied neither through classical methods for saturated soils nor through concepts valid for unsaturated soils with continuous fluid phases. To fill this gap, this paper proposes to adapt to gas-charged soils a set of techniques that until now has been used only for fully saturated soils or unsaturated media with a continuous gas phase. In particular, the pore fluid has been modeled as a homogenized liquid-gas mixture of nonnegligible compressibility, and an expression of second-order work for porous media filled by such a compressible fluid has been derived. The use of incremental constitutive relations for the solid-fluid mixture has thus enabled the definition of controllability criteria specific for quasi-saturated soils subjected to drained and/or undrained loading paths. Such criteria have been computed through an elastoplastic model for loose granular soils and have been used to reinterpret evidence from labora...