Directional response of a reconstituted fine-grained soil—Part II: performance of different constitutive models

Abstract

In this paper, the performance of different advanced constitutive models for soils is evaluated with respect to the experimentally observed behaviour of a soft reconstituted clay subject to a wide range of loading directions, see (presented in the companion paper). The models considered include a three-surface kinematic hardening elastoplastic model; the CLoE hypoplastic model; a recently proposed K-hypoplastic model for clays, and an enhanced version of the same model incorporating the concept of intergranular strain. A clear qualitative picture of the relative performance of the different models as a function of the loading direction is obtained by means of the incremental strain response envelopes. The definition of suitable error measures allows to obtain further quantitative information in this respect. For the particular initial conditions and loading programme considered in this study, the kinematic hardening and the enhanced K-hypoplastic models appear to provide the best performance overall. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.