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Received January 5, 2013; accepted February 22, 2013; published online April 4, 2013
The last two to three decades have seen significant advances in the mechanics of unsaturated soils. It is now widely recognized that the fundamental principles in soil mechanics must cover both saturated and unsaturated soils. Nevertheless, there is
still a great deal of uncertainties in the geotechnical community about how soil mechanics principles well-established for saturated soils can be extended to unsaturated soils. There is even wide skepticism about the necessity of such extension in engineering practice. This paper discusses some common pitfalls related to the fundamental principles that govern the volume
change, shear strength and hydromechanical behaviour of unsaturated soils. It also attempts to address the issue of engineering
relevance of unsaturated soil mechanics.
unsaturated soils, constitutive modeling, volume change, shear strength, engineering applications
Citation:
Sheng D C, Zang S, Yu Z W. Unanswered questions in unsaturated soil mechanics. Sci China Tech Sci, 2013, 56: 12571272, doi:
10.1007/s11431-013- 5202-9
1 Introduction
Research on unsaturated soil behaviour probably dates back
to 1920s [1], but it was not until 1950s that significant research effort has been devoted to the geotechnical aspects of
unsaturated soils [29]. Some early Chinese contributions
towards understanding unsaturated soil behaviour include,
for example, the classification of liquid and gas status in
unsaturated soils by Yu & Chen [10], and the stress-strainstrength behaviour of unsaturated soils by Lu et al. [11],
Chen et al. [12, 13], Shen [14] and Li et al. [15]. Some early
Japanese contributions include the theoretical work of
Karube et al. [16] and Kohgo et al. [17, 18]. The subject of
unsaturated soil mechanics has particularly flourished since
1990s, much attributed to the inspirational work of Alonso
et al. [19] and Fredlund et al. [20]. Indeed, the most significant developments in theoretical soil mechanics during the
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Figure 2 Pore size characteristics of (a) natural residual soil and (b)
reconstituted soil. (a) Pore size distribution of a natural residual soil (Futai
& Almeida [24]); (b) pore size distribution of a soil reconstituted from
slurry (Tarantino [25]).
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Figure 5
suction can make the soil collapsible (Figure 6). Therefore, the available data in the literature seem to support the
evolution of the LC yield surface as suggested by the SFG
model (Figure 4). However, experimental data on reconstituted soils are generally too few to be conclusive on this
specific characteristic.
In summary, the microstructure and particularly the pore
size distribution of a soil are usually reflected in the yield
surface and volume change behaviour of the constitutive
model for the soil. As recently pointed out by Tarantino
[25], the boundary between compacted and reconstituted
soils is not always clear and the microstructure of a soil can
change with stress and hydraulic paths. A bimodal pore size
distribution can evolve to a unimodal pore size distribution
under appropriate stress and hydraulic paths, and vice versa.
Some existing constitutive models for unsaturated soils can
potentially be applied to different types of unsaturated soils,
at least as a first-order approximation.
Oedometer curves for air-dry silt soaked at various constant applied pressures (after Jennings & Burland [6]).
Sheng D C, et al.
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Figure 7 Evolution of yield surface for a reconstituted soil. s, Suction; p , net mean stress; p , effective mean stress; pc0, preconsolidation stress at zero
suction; ABC, stress path under constant net mean stress; CD, stress path under constant suction.
c n tan s tan b
tan b
c n s
tan
tan c n tan ,
(1)
Figure 8
Sheng D C, et al.
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plementation.
The above-mentioned advantages and shortcomings of
the two categories of models are relatively well known in
the literature. However, there is one specific issue of using
the Bishop effective stress, which is related to the volume
change equation and is less known in the literature, as described below.
A general form of the effective stress can be
p p ( s, S r ) s,
(2)
(3)
where v is the specific volume of the soil, is the compression index, and N is the specific volume when ln p 0 or
the specific volume for a soil slurry (at the liquid limit). If
the effective stress is indeed effective in controlling volume
change, the specific volume (v) should remain constant under constant p , and hence N and should be independent
of suction. However, this is seldom true in reality. In the
literature, N and are usually assumed to be functions of s.
We will show below that a varying N can lead to inconsistency with the yield surface evolution and cannot be
recommended.
In all the models that are based on effective stress, the
apparent tensile strength surface or the zero shear strength
surface is assumed to be the vertical line that goes through
zero effective mean stress, i.e.,
p 0.
(4)
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Case (1) would lead to the constraint that must decrease with increasing suction, which suggests that the collapse strain increases with increasing stress level and the
soil compressibility decreases with increasing suction. Such
behaviour is not always supported by experimental data.
Experimental data by, for example, Toll [38], Sharma [44],
Sivakumar et al. [45] and Toll et al. [46] all indicate that the
soil compressibility can increase with increasing suction
(Figure 10). The data by, for example, Vilar et al. [47], Sun
et al. [48, 49] and Vilar et al. [50] show that the collapse
potential reaches a maximum at intermediate stress levels.
Case (2) suggests that the soil volume increases when drying under constant effective mean stress, which is not supported by any experimental data.
A possible strategy to overcome the above limitation of
the Bishop effective stress approach is to adopt a volume
change equation of the following form:
v N ( S r ) ln p ,
(5)
pc pc0 ( Sr ) ,
(6)
Figure 10
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5 Engineering relevance
implications.
Figure 12 A closed loop in the net stress space and its corresponding
open loop in the effective stress space.
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ly showed that the strength and stiffness of marls and claystones decreased significantly with increasing number of
humidity change cycles (Figure 16). Chandler [61] and
Berdugo [59] also showed the significant decrease of undrained shear strength of claystones with water content
(Figure 17). This loss of strength and stiffness, combined
with the development of tensile cracks caused by excavation
and cutting, can cause slope instability and landslide problems (Figure 18). For example, landslides occurred along
the F3 freeway between Sydney and Newcastle, due to the
wetting of thin claystone layers and deep tensile cracks.
One key question about landslides of unsaturated soil
slopes is: how can we incorporate the strength reduction due
to saturation increase into the slope stability analysis? Much
progress has been made in this respect. For example, Cai
and Ugai [62] studied the dependency of the safety factor on
the rainfall intensity and duration via a shear strength reduction scheme. Griffiths and Lu [63] adopted an analytical
Figure 13 Thredbo landslide, NSW, Australia, 1997 (image from Geoscience Australia).
Figure 15 Degradation of claystone in moist air (Pineda et al. [56]). (a) t=0;
(b) t=150 d.
Sheng D C, et al.
Figure 18
Landslide in claystone.
Figure 17
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for design.
Significant heave (almost 23 cm) occurred at portions of
the building in the first 3 years. Some early remediation measures were applied, including replacement of the damaged
concrete masonry unit partition walls, cosmetic repairs, removing the lawn and ponds, and installation of deep dewater ing wells. In spite of these efforts, heave continued progressing across the building. In 2005, heave impacted over
three-quarters of the building: maximum heave was about
30.5 cm and over half of the building had raised more than
6 cm.
The damages on the building had been primarily in the
form of shear cracking of concrete masonry unit partition
walls, drywall distress and racked door frames. In addition,
damages also occurred to the drilled shafts caused by lateral
displacement of ground as the bedrock had expanded, which
was the most significant structural distress. At least 10
drilled shafts with 107 cm diameters had sheared at or near
ground line and the relative displacement across the shear
cracks was 5 cm or more (see Figure 19).
The main reason for heave leading to structure damage
can be attributed to the soil expansion due to soil moisture
rising. Moisture profile indicated that soil moisture at heave
areas was much higher than non-heave areas, as shown in
ref. [67]. Boring I-1 was drilled in the basement where the
greatest heave occurred (22.9 cm), and boring I-2 was in the
location where the heave was about 5 cm. Compared with
non-heave area, the soil moisture raised up to 75% at I-1
and up to 25% at I-2 (see Figure 20).
Forensic investigation indicated that the main reasons
leading to the rapid soil moisture raise included: (1) the excavation was backfilled with river sand and gravel, which
allowed infiltrating water to flow promptly to the bottom of
the building; (2) The perched groundwater flowed to the
pond on the west and towards the building to the east via
high permeability backfills (sand and gravel).
5.3 Accumulated settlement in high-speed rail embankment due to seasonal wetting and drying
Cardoso et al. [68] presented an interesting case where seasonal drying and wetting caused undesirable accumulated
settlement for a high speed railway embankment. The em-
Figure 20 Soil moisture profiles for heave and non-heave areas (after
Attwooll et al. [67]).
bankment cross section is shown in Figure 21(a). The subgrade soil is a non-plastic silty sand classified as SM according to the Unified Soil Classification System. The soil
is considered to be an appropriate base material if it is
properly compacted and drained.
The embankment cross section under seasonal drying and
wetting was simulated using the finite element code CODE_
BRIGHT. The BBM (Alonso et al. [19]) was used to represent the behaviour of subgrade soil. The accumulated settlement at point A (Figure 21(a)) is shown in Figure 21(b).
While the seasonal fluctuations after the first 2 years are
minimum, the initial settlement during the first 2 years can
be significant, particularly for high-speed trains which are
more sensitive to vertical displacements than traditional
geotechnical structures.
Jiang and his co-workers [69, 70]) had paid much attention to the calculation of settlement of high-speed rail embankments founded on unsaturated subgrades. They used a
simplified consolidation theory of unsaturated soils and
modified the unsaturated soil permeability according to
soil-water characteristic curves. They also considered various ground improvement methods of the unsaturated subgrades. Their calculations seem to be reasonably accurate
when compared with field measurements.
5.4
Figure 19
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6 Concluding remarks
In an attempt to answer those questions posed in the Introduction, the following remarks can be made:
1) It seems possible to use the same theoretical framework to model reconstituted soils and compacted soils. The
pore size distribution evolves with stress and suction paths
and can be modelled by the evolution of the loading collapse yield surface. However, much experimental evidence
is needed before an affirmative conclusion can be drawn. In
particular, we need more experimental data on the behaviour of natural soils or soils reconstituted from slurry.
2) The volume change, yield stress and shear strength
behaviour of an unsaturated soil are co-related to each other
and it is not recommended to define these functions separately. Of all these functions, the volume change equation is
the most fundamental one and it underpins the yield stresssuction and shear strength-suction relations.
3) The loading-collapse yield surface should recover the
apparent tensile strength surface when the preconsolidation
stress at zero suction is set to zero, to avoid non-uniqueness
of the yield surface. The suction-increase yield surface used
to capture the possible plastic volume change associated
with drying is not truly needed, if the loading-collapse yield
surface is properly defined.
4) The shear strength of an unsaturated soil can be defined by a single effective stress, if the friction angle of the
soil does not change with suction. On the other hand, the
volume change behaviour of unsaturated soils usually has to
be expressed in two stress variables.
5) There are implications associated with using the
Bishop effective stress. Because there is only one compression index associated with both stress and suction changes
in the volume change equation, this compression index is
constrained to decrease with increasing suction. Such a constraint is not always supported by experimental data. A possible solution is to adopt a saturation-dependent compression index and to form the constitutive equations in the
stress-saturation space.
6) All the existing elastoplastic models for unsaturated
soils have stress-path dependent elastic behaviour. It is still
a challenging task to solve this theoretical problem.
The mechanics of unsaturated soils has strong engineering relevance. Most geotechnical problems involve some
variations of suction, water content or degree of saturation.
These variations can cause significant volume change and
strength variation, leading to undesirable deformation and
stability problems. It is likely that we will see further developments and more engineering applications of unsaturated soil mechanics in the next few decades.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Grant No. 51208519).
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