Applicability of hypoplasticity to reconstituted peat from drained triaxial tests

Stefano Muraro, David Mašín, Cristina Jommi*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Proper understanding of the deviatoric behaviour of peats represents a challenge in soil mechanics. Exceptional high compressibility together with extremely high friction angles distinguishes peats from classical organic soils. Considerable amount of triaxial test data on peats can be found in the literature, mostly coming from standard undrained triaxial compression tests. However, only a minor part was intended to describe their prefailure behaviour. Also, limiting the investigation to the undrained response reduces the information on those ingredients of constitutive models, which are necessary to describe the deformational behaviour. This contribution aims to provide better insight into the prefailure deformational behaviour of peats, by analysing in detail the results of non-standard drained tests at various stress paths and undrained tests performed on reconstituted peat samples. Based on the experimental findings, an existing hypoplastic model, originally developed for fine-grained soils, has been adapted to capture the behaviour of peats. The model is directly calibrated on selected experimental results and validated on a variety of different stress path tests. The results reveal the merits of hypoplasticity in modelling the nonlinearity of the prefailure behaviour and the directional response of peats, which both are of great importance when assessing the serviceability limit states of geotechnical structures founded on peats.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2049-2064
Number of pages16
JournalInternational Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics
Volume42
Issue number17
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Dec 2018

Keywords

  • constitutive modelling
  • drained triaxial tests
  • hypoplasticity
  • laboratory tests
  • peat

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