Efficient Approach to Characterize Strength Anisotropy in Soils
Publication: Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 138, Issue 12
Abstract
Strength anisotropy in soils needs to be characterized by proper anisotropic failure criterion. This paper presents a novel yet simple methodology to generalize an isotropic failure criterion to account for strength anisotropy in soils. A salient ingredient of the method involves the introduction of the degree of cross anisotropy and an anisotropic variable, defined by the joint invariant of the deviatoric stress tensor and the deviatoric fabric tensor, into the frictional characteristic of the isotropic criterion. The well-received Lade’s failure criterion is taken as an example to demonstrate the generalization. Predictions using the newly generalized Lade’s criterion for a number of soils, including completely decomposed granite, glass beads (virtual sand), natural clays, sand, as well as silty sand, show good agreement with test data. The proposed approach has proved to be simple and generic, and can be effortlessly applied to many existing isotropic failure criteria to adapt them to account for strength anisotropy. The treatment also requires very few parameters, which can be conveniently calibrated from conventional laboratory tests in most cases.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (under GRF 623211 and SBI08/09.EG02).
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 138 • Issue 12 • December 2012
Pages: 1447 - 1456
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 27, 2011
Accepted: Apr 9, 2012
Published online: Apr 12, 2012
Published in print: Dec 1, 2012
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