Use of piezocone tests to predict consolidation yield stress and overconsolidation ratio of lagoonal deposit soil

Existing empirical methods for interpreting the consolidation yield stress and the overconsolidation ratio （OCR） in clays from piezocone tests are briefly reviewed. It can be seen that no universal correlation exists for all worldwide sites. However, for a given clay deposit, there does exist a most appropriate method to reflect the consolidation yield stress and the OCR based on piezocone test data. Three empirical methods are compared based on the piezocone test data collected on Lixia River lagoonal deposit soil sites in the north of Jiangsu province. The objective of this study is to evaluate the validity of the existing relationships linking the consolidation yield stress to piezocone test data and identify the appropriate method for Lixia River lagoonal deposit soil. It is shown that the correlation based on the net tip resistance has much higher accuracy for estimating the consolidation yield stress of lagoonal deposit soil than other methods.

Methods for evaluating overconsolidation ratio from piezocone sounding results

Methods for estimating the overconsolidation ratio(OCR)of soil deposits from piezocone sounding results have been investigated.Three existing methods have been briefly reviewed and a new method has been proposed.The proposed method can be applied to both normally consolidated/overconsolidated and underconsolidated deposits.Furthermore,existing methods have been modified so that they can be applied to underconsolidated deposits.Then,all the methods have been applied to 12 case histories collected from 6 different countries.The estimated values of OCR have been compared with the measured data.It has been shown that if the parameters(soil properties and empirical parameters)can be determined appropriately,then all the methods can achieve a reasonable prediction.It has also been shown that the proposed method exhibits a relatively better performance and results in less scattered data than the other methods.

Cyclic stress-controlled tests on offshore clay

One of the main concerns in cyclic behavior of soft clay is gradual degradation with the progression of loading cycle.A series of cyclic constant-volume direct simple shear(CDSS) loading tests was performed on Malaysia offshore clay to study its undrained degradation.The testing program consists of stresscontrolled tests with cyclic shear ratio ranging from 0.34 to 0.83 at different overconsolidation ratios(OCRs).For a given cyclic stress ratio in stress-controlled tests,the accumulated cyclic strain and pore water pressure increase with elevated number of cycles.In heavily overconsolidated clay specimens,the negative cyclic pore water pressure is generated followed by positive cyclic pore water pressure as cyclic tests progress.The post-cyclic strength of offshore clay specimens is reduced by undrained cyclic stresscontrolled loading.

Modeling of strength and deformation of overconsolidated clays based on bounding surface plasticity

An elastoplastic constitutive model for overconsolidated clays is established in the framework of the critical state theory and bounding surface plasticity theory. The bounding surface is defined as the maximum yield surface in the loading history. A yielding ratio, i.e., an internal variant, is defined as the size ratio of the current yield surface to the corresponding bounding surface. The yielding ratio instead of the overconsolidation ratio(OCR) is used to evaluate the strength and stress-strain behaviors of overconsolidated clays in the shearing process. The bounding stress ratio incorporating the effect of the yielding ratio is used to characterize the potential failure strength of the overconsolidated clays. The dilation stress ratio taking into account the effect of the yielding ratio is applied to describe the dilatancy behaviors of the overconsolidated clays. Comparisons between model predictions and test data show that the proposed model could well capture the strength and stress-strain behaviors of normally consolidated and overconsolidated clays.