Unloading behavior of clays measured by CRS test

Abstract

The unloading behavior of clays was studied by the Constant Rate of Strain (CRS) test, for three clays: two of them are reconstituted and the other was intact. In the conventional CRS test where the stress monotonically increases, the distribution of the pore water pressure in a specimen is assumed to be parabolic, the effective stress is calculated and then the compression behavior is evaluated. However, this assumption cannot be directly applied the unloading condition. In this study, the pore pressure distribution under unloading was simulated by a cubic polynomial under the assumption that hydraulic conductivity does not change in the unloading process. A unique relation in the e–logσ′v relation was found, irrespective of both the magnitude of stress or strain and the compression index, Cc, at the unloading test, when the consolidation pressure is normalized by σ′vmax, which is the consolidation pressure before the unloading test. In addition, the creep strain, which is gained by constant loading before the unloading test, was shown to have a great effect on the unloading behavior: that is, the soil behaves stiffly when subjected to a constant load for a prolonged period of time. A strain rate dependency in the unloading process was also observed particularly for heavily unloaded specimens. The unloading behavior was also investigated by the conventional constant load test. The test results show reasonable agreement with those obtained from the CRS test.