Soil Parameters for Design with the 3D PLAXIS Hardening Soil Model

Abstract

The design and analysis of buried structures presents difficulties that cannot often be solved by closed-form solutions. Finite element methods (FEM) have increasingly become the tool of choice for advanced soil-structure interaction analysis, with three-dimensional FEM being required for irregular non-plane-strain cases. To accurately capture the stress and deformation of soils, complex material constitutive models are required. Several input parameters to these models must be determined from expensive soil testing, which is impractical for most applications. For two-dimensional FEM, good approximations of these parameters for a wide range of placed backfill soils have been developed and used in practice for many years in the computer program CANDE. It is the purpose of this paper to take these parameters, developed by Selig for use in CANDE, and convert them to equivalent parameters for the three-dimensional PLAXIS computer program’s Hardening Soil model.