| Issue |
E3S Web Conf.
Volume 9, 2016
3rd European Conference on Unsaturated Soils – “E-UNSAT 2016”
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 14010 | |
| Number of page(s) | 6 | |
| Section | Mechanical Behaviour | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/20160914010 | |
| Published online | 12 September 2016 | |
Relating shear strength of unsaturated soils with capillary water retention curve
1 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Vic 3001, Australia
2 The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia
a Corresponding author: annan.zhou@rmit.edu.au
This paper proposes a new water retention model for unsaturated soils, which takes into account capillary condensation of adsorbed water. In the proposed water retention model, the degree of saturation of a soil is separated into that based on capillary water and that based on adsorbed water. Through the analysis of a partially saturated two-cylinder system, a new shear strength criterion for unsaturated soils is proposed, in which only the degree of saturation based on capillary water contributes to the variation of shear strength with suction. The proposed shear strength criterion is justified against thermodynamic principles. The proposed strength criterion is compared against existing criteria in the literature, which shows that it provides a much improved prediction of the experimental data, for a wide range of suction values.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2016
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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