Thermal volume change of poorly draining soils II: Model development and experimental validation

Abstract

This study presents the development of an alternative constitutive model for predicting the thermal volume change of saturated and unsaturated soils using the concept of thermally-accelerated secondary compression. The model requires observation of the secondary compression response prior to drained heating to estimate the coefficient of secondary compression. The model was found to successfully capture the trends in thermal volume change arising from accelerated secondary compression resulting from prior mechanical loading for unsaturated, compacted Bonny silt. The model was also used successfully to represent data from the literature for normally consolidated and heavily overconsolidated soils prepared with different loading paths.