Abstract
Small-strain shear modulus, G max , is a key evaluation index to study the dynamic characteristics of soil in geotechnical engineering. It is widely adopted to evaluate the stiffness of soft soil in soil dynamic engineering. In this paper, the cyclic triaxial tests and resonance column tests were carried out to explore the variation of G max of soft clay with respect to various confining stresses, cyclic shear stress ratios, pore pressures, and effective stress paths. Test results indicated that the effective stress decreased gradually with the increase of the cycle shear stress ratio. The failure points were mainly concentrated in a rectangular area, defined by the normalized effective stress from 0.56 to 0.64 and the normalized shear modulus from 0.72 to 0.78. Additionally, a short pause caused a small increase of 1-2% in G max as well as pore pressure. This study demonstrates that G max can be effectively used to characterize the failure of saturated soft clay in a more intuitive and convenient way, compared to the commonly used strain failure standards.
Highlights
Soft clay is found in coastal plains, estuary deltas, lake basins around, mountain valleys, and other areas, most of which belong to the middle or late Fourth Age
These studies demonstrated that the dynamic shear modulus decreased, and the cyclic strain accumulation increased with an increase in cycle stress ratio (CSR) [18]
The dynamic triaxial joint bending element test and the resonance column test were conducted for saturated soft clay in the southeast coast of China to investigate the interaction between Gmax and soft clay mechanical parameters
Summary
Soft clay is found in coastal plains, estuary deltas, lake basins around, mountain valleys, and other areas, most of which belong to the middle or late Fourth Age. Several researchers have developed an uniaxial shear test instrument with multidirectional and looping capabilities to study the dynamic characteristics of soft clay [15,16,17] These studies demonstrated that the dynamic shear modulus decreased, and the cyclic strain accumulation increased with an increase in CSR [18]. According to the recorded acceleration calculation of the time and orbit of the shear strain, it can be clearly seen that seismic effect is produced by multidirectional shear strain [27, 28] It was carried out by Bowman and Soga [29] about experimental research on the shear modulus for temporal change effects based on various test materials such as indoor clean sand and Gulf of Mexico soft clay.
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