Applicability of Burger Model in Predicting the Response of Viscoelastic Soil Beds

This paper presents a critical review of various viscoelastic lumped parameter models (Maxwell model, Kelvin-Voigt model, Poynting-Thompson model and Burger model) commonly used to represent the stress-strain-time behavior of a compressible viscoelastic medium. Efficacy of such models has been checked to suggest a rational model so as to represent the time-dependent behavior of such media. Though Burger's four element model can incorporate all the phenomena of viscoelastic behavior of materials and all other models can be degenerated to other lower order models, it has not yet found general acceptability amongst the soil engineers to model such behavior of soils. Through this study, an effort has been made to demonstrate that it is probably the most effective model to predict the behavior of structures resting on such soils. Therefore, the efficacy of the model so chosen has been demonstrated through a case-study available in literature. Based on the studies, it has been inferred that the Burger model possesses an excellent potential for proper representation of the time-dependent behavior of a saturated viscoelastic medium when subjected to loading an unloading phenomena.