Loading rate influence on high-cyclic loading of clays

Abstract

Experimental observations reported in the literature, based on cyclic triaxial and cyclic simple shear tests, show that the loading frequency influences the excess pore pressure and strain accumulation for fine-grained soils under undrained conditions. A high-cycle accumulation (HCA) model for clay was introduced by Wichtmann (2016) and Staubach et al. (2022) to quantify the strain/pore pressure accumulation as a function of the number of applied cycles, amplitude, void ratio, stress ratio, OCR and loading frequency. This article explores the convenience of including the loading frequency factor in the HCA clay model based on the interpretation of a series of cyclic undrained triaxial tests performed on three different clay materials, namely Dorfner kaolin, Lower Rhine clay and Onsøy clay. Analysis of results shows that for those specific three clay materials, the normalization of the pore pressure accumulation rate u̇acc with the amplitude function fampl purifies the data from the influence of loading frequency and thus no explicit frequency function ff is required.