Review of fundamental principles in modelling unsaturated soil behaviour

Abstract

An unsaturated soil is a state of the soil. All soils can be partially saturated with water. Therefore, constitutive models for soils should ideally represent the soil behaviour over entire ranges of possible pore pressure and stress values and allow arbitrary stress and hydraulic paths within these ranges. The last two decades or so have seen significant advances in modelling unsaturated soil behaviour. This paper presents a review of constitutive models for unsaturated soils. In particular, it focuses on the fundamental principles that govern the volume change, shear strength, yield stress, water retention and hydro-mechanical coupling. Alternative forms of these principles are critically examined in terms of their predictive capacity for experimental data, the consistency between these principles and the continuity between saturated and unsaturated states.