Experimental and Theoretical Investigations of the Constitutive Relations of Artificial Frozen Silty Clay

• Main Authors: Zhiming Li, Jian Chen, Chaojun Mao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-09-01
• Series: Materials
• Subjects: artificial frozen silty clay; constitutive relation; statistical damage; triaxial experiment
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/12/19/3159

The strength and deformation characteristics of artificial frozen soils are quite sensitive to temperature, confining pressure, and water content. To investigate these effects, a series of triaxial compressive tests on frozen Harbin silty clay were conducted at temperatures of −5 °C, −10 °C, and −15 °C under different confining pressures and water contents. From the stress−strain curves under lower water content and confining pressure, strain−softening behavior was observed. The modified Duncan−Chang (MDC) model was employed to describe the constitutive relations of artificial frozen silty clay while considering the strain−softening effects. After introducing statistical damage (SD) theory, an SD constitutive model with the failure strain as a random variable was proposed, which is able to overcome the drawbacks of the MDC model. The predicted SD model results are found to be consistent with the experimental results.