Postcyclic Degradation of Strength and Stiffness for Low Plasticity Silt
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 129, Issue 8
Abstract
Stress-controlled undrained cyclic triaxial tests followed by strain-controlled monotonic compressive shear tests were carried out on normally consolidated and overconsolidated reconstituted Keuper Marl silt to investigate the strength and stiffness degradation characteristics of a low plasticity silt. Special attention was paid to the changes in undrained strength and deformation modulus after undrained cyclic loading. It was observed that cyclic degradation in stiffness for low plasticity silt is more marked than that of strength, and this tendency increases with increasing overconsolidation ratio. It was found that a previously proposed model for predicting postcyclic degradation in strength and stiffness of normally consolidated fine-grained soils could be applied to that of overconsolidated silt but not however to the postcyclic degradation in Young’s modulus. Thus, an attempt was made to correlate postcyclic degradation of overconsolidated silt to the equivalent cyclic shear strain instead of the normalized excess pore pressure. It was concluded that cyclic shear strain was a better parameter than cyclic-induced excess pore pressure for correlating the postcyclic stiffness degradation not only for normally consolidated but also for overconsolidated silt.
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 129 • Issue 8 • August 2003
Pages: 756 - 769
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 30, 2001
Accepted: Oct 2, 2002
Published online: Jul 15, 2003
Published in print: Aug 2003
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