Dynamic visco-plastic memorial nested yield surface model of soil

Abstract

Under cyclic loadings, the plastic strain of soft soil will take place under very small shear strain. So the visco-plastic model is appropriate to be used to model the dynamic characteristics of soft soil. Based on the principles of geotechnical plastic mechanics, the incremental visco-plastic memorial nested yield surface model is developed by using the field theory of nonlinear isotropic materials and the theory of kinematical hardening modulus. At the end of anyone time increment, the inverted loading surface, the damaged surface and the initial loading surface which is tangent with the inside of inverted loading surface are memorized respectively. The kinematical behavior of yield surface is defined by using these three surfaces. The developed model in this paper is successfully implemented in ABAQUS using FORTRAN subroutine. The predicted stress-strain relationships of soft soil are compared with the test results given by dynamic triaxial tests. It is proved that the cyclic undrained stress-strain relation of soils can be fairly simulated by the model. At last, the nonlinear earthquake response of a representative soft site in Nanjing city is calculated with the dynamic behavior of soils modeled by the new developed model. The results are accordant to the earthquake response of soft site given by other scholars.