Bounding surface plasticity model for natural clays

Natural soft clay exhibits a considerable degree of anisotropy as a result of its past sedimentation and consolidation history. It also tends to have significant inter-particle bonding, which affects its mechanical behavior. The natural structure of in-situ soils makes their behavior different from that of a reconstituted material. In fact, most clays lose a proportion of their strength when remoulded. Various authors proposed anisotropic elastoplastic soil models allowing the yield surface to rotate with the stress history. These models have a “rotational hardening law" which relates the change of the inclination of the yield surface to the current soil state and to the increments of the plastic volumetric and/or shear strain, [Sekiguchi and Otha (1977)], [Hashiguchi and Chen (1998)], [Wheeller et al (2003)]… Other authors combine the plastic anisotropy with destructuration effects observed in soft sensitive soils by assuming that the size and /or the position of the center of the yield surface depends on the amount of the structural soil degradation. These models use an additional isotropic hardening law that relates the size and/or the position of the yield surface of the intact sample to that of the reconstituted one [Nova et al (2003)]. The previous models provide little or no flexibility when it comes to describe the change of the plastic modulus with the loading direction as they are unable to produce a smooth degradation of the stiffness, being single yield surface models. A way to improve this behavior is to introduce the “bounding surface plasticity” theory, initially developed by Dafalias [Dafalias and Herrmann 1986]. Unlike a single yield surface model, the bounding surface theory allows a smooth transition of stresses within and on the bounding surface. The mean feature of this concept is that the actual stress is mapped to the imaginary stress on the bounding surface. The distance between the real and imaginary stress, which is called the “ function distance ”, is used to specify the plastic modulus. This work presents a bounding surface plasticity model for natural and structured clays based on the critical state theory. A novel rotational hardening rule for clays is presented, and a hardening function distance is introduced to describe the evolution of the bounding surface. Validation of the model is provided by drained and undrained tests of Scottish and Finnish intact and reconstituted clays [Kastunnen 2008]. Finally, finite element simulations of a foundation considering the formulated constitutive law are presented.