3D Elastoplastic Model for Fine-Grained Gassy Soil Considering the Gas-Dependent Yield Surface Shape and Stress-Dilatancy
Publication: Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 146, Issue 5
Abstract
Fine-grained sediments containing large discrete gas bubbles are widely distributed in the five continents throughout the world. The presence of gas bubbles could either degrade or enhance the hardening behavior and undrained shear strength () of the soil, depending on the initial pore water pressure () and initial gas volume fraction (). The existing constitutive models, however, can solely capture either detrimental or beneficial effect owing to the presence of gas. This study presents a new three-dimensional (3D) elastoplastic constitutive model that describes both the damaging and beneficial effects of gas bubbles on the stress–strain behavior of fine-grained gassy soil in a unified manner. This was achieved by incorporating (1) a versatile expression of yield function that simulates a wide range of yield curve shapes in a unified context, and (2) a dilatancy function capturing the distinct stress–dilatancy behavior of fine-grained gassy soil. Given the lack of direct experimental evidence on the shape of the yield curve of fine-grained gassy soil, new experiments were performed. This has led to the identification of three distinct shapes of yield curve—bullet, ellipse, and teardrop—as well as the formulation of the yield function considering the dependency of yield curve shapes on and . The new model was shown to reasonably capture both the damaging and beneficial effects of gas on the compression and shear behavior of three types of fine-grained gassy soils with a broad range of and by using a unified set of parameters.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Key Research and Development Program (2018YFE0109500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51779221 and 51939010), the Key Research and Development Program of Zhejiang Province (2018C03031), and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (LHZ20E090001). The authors are also grateful to Mr. Bin Yang, a former student at Zhejiang University, for his contribution in formulating the preliminary ideas for the model.
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Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 146 • Issue 5 • May 2020
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©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: May 1, 2019
Accepted: Nov 14, 2019
Published online: Mar 16, 2020
Published in print: May 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Aug 16, 2020
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