A constitutive model for unsaturated soils: thermomechanical and computational aspects

By D. Sheng, Scott W. Sloan, A. Gens. 2004

309 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper first presents a complete formulation of a constitutive model that deals with the irreversible behaviour of unsaturated soils under various loading and drying/wetting conditions. A standard form of incremental stress-strain relations is derived. The constitutive model is then cast into the thermodynamical theories and verified using the thermomechanical principles. It is shown that hydraulic hysteresis does not contribute to the plastic dissipation, though it contributes to the plastic work. All plastic work associated with a plastic increment of the degree of saturation is stored and can be recovered in a reversed plastic increment of saturation. The incremental constitutive equations are also reformulated for implementation in finite element codes where displacements and pore pressures are primary unknowns. Qualitative predictions of the constitutive model show that incorporating two suction related yield surfaces and non-associated flow rules into the Barcelona Basic Model opens a full range of possibilities in modelling unsaturated soil behaviour.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/530da1c58f595443792a8309e2bc63bcba5f3a1a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Civil and Structural Engineering

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Citations in the corpus

A new modelling approach for unsaturated soils using independent stress variables (2008, background): “More recent models have incorporated suction–saturation relationships with hysteresis into stress–strain relationships (Wheeler 1996; Dangla et al. 1997; Vaunat et al. 2000; Gallipoli et al. 2003; Wheeler et al. 2003; Sheng et al. 2004; Santagiuliana and Schrefler 2006; Sun et al. 2007a).”
Shear Strength Criteria for Unsaturated Soils (2011, methodology): “This form of Bishop’s effective stress has also been used by other researchers in modelling unsaturated soils (e.g., Sheng et al. 2003, 2004; Nuth and Laloui 2008).”
Unraveling the temperature dependence of the yield strength in single-crystal tungsten using atomistically-informed crystal plasticity calculations (2015, background): “…culmination of crystal plasticity calculations, and can be used as constitutive input into continuum models to simulate effective mechanical behavior at the engineering scale, for component design and/or to simulate, e.g., thermo-mechanical treatments (Sheng et al., 2004; Serenelli et al., 2010).”
Generalized plasticity state parameter‐based model for saturated and unsaturated soils. Part II: Unsaturated soil modeling (2011, methodology): “After Jommi [22] proposed a general framework for Critical State models, attention first focused on modeling isotropic compression tests [23–25], and later shearing behavior was modeled [26–28], and Santagiuliana [29] who enhanced a previous model by Bolzon et al.”
Enhancing the Bolzon–Schrefler–Zienkiewicz Constitutive Model for Partially Saturated Soil (2006, background): “choice is that the stress tensor changes form between saturated and unsaturated states; when the pore air is absent, the constitutive equations for saturated states cannot recover those for unsaturated states without additional control (Sheng et al., 2004).”
Modified state-surface approach to the study of unsaturated soil behavior. Part II: General formulation (2009, unknown): “Consequently, most of them have used ‘‘normal compression lines at different matric suction levels’’ to develop their constitutive models (Gens and Alonso 1992; Alonso et al. 1994, 1999; Cui and Delage 1996; Delage and Graham 1996; Gens 1996; Wheeler 1996; Wheeler and Karube 1996; Dangla et al. 1997”
A hypoplastic model for mechanical response of unsaturated soils (2008, unknown): “[44], Borja [6], Ehlers et al.”
Effective stress concept in unsaturated soils: Clarification and validation of a unified framework (2008, background): “[44] motivated their choice of the following work-conjugate stresses and strains: ( ′”