Experimental Study on the Monotonic and Cyclic Behavior of Carbonate Sand in the South China Sea

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Carbonate soils have specific properties that differ from those of siliceous sand. The monotonic and cyclic behavior of carbonate sand from Jinqing Island in the South China Sea was examined by undrained monotonic and cyclic simple shear tests in this paper. The monotonic test results show that the phase transformation state friction angle is 25.7°, and the critical state friction angle decreases from 38.7° to 37.3° due to particle crushing. By comparing the experimental data from the monotonic and cyclic tests, we found that the trend of the peak shear stress ratio with shear strain in each cycle of cyclic tests was close to that of monotonic tests. If the cyclic stress ratio of symmetrical cyclic tests is normalized with the phase transformation strengths obtained by the corresponding monotonic tests, it has a good relationship with the number of cycles at failure and is not affected by the relative density and vertical consolidation stress. The effects of the relative density, vertical consolidation stress and initial static shear stress on the undrained cyclic strength are discussed. Finally, a comparison of the undrained cyclic strength of carbonate sand from different regions shows that different carbonate sands have almost identical undrained cyclic strength under the medium dense state, but significant quantitative differences are observed between these carbonate sands under the dense state.