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Rate-dependent behavior of a saturated reconstituted clay under different over-consolidation ratios and sample variance

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Abstract

This paper intends to study the influence of the shearing rate on the undrained monotonic behavior of marine clay under different over-consolidation ratios and the effect of sample variance. A series of undrained triaxial tests with isotropic consolidation was performed. The tests were either conducted with a constant strain rate (single-stage tests) or with different strain rates applied in succession (multi-stage tests, step-change shearing rate tests), the latter with and without relaxation phases. The tests were conducted on saturated reconstituted Macau marine clay. It has been found that a higher overconsolidation ratio tends to produce a lower excess pore pressure, while faster shearing tends to lead to a higher undrained shear strength and a lower induced excess pore pressure. Besides, the influence of sample variance, which means the differences between the undrained shear strength and excess pore water pressure derived from tests with equal OCR and shearing rate, performed as either a single-stage or a multi-stage test, was found relatively small. It can be concluded that a test with different shearing rates applied in succession to the same specimen is sufficient to study the rate-dependent undrained behavior of saturated clay. Two different approaches for the description of the rate effects on the undrained shear strength, following Mitchell and Soga or Graham et al., respectively, have been extended by the influence of OCR. Based on comparison, the extended equation of Graham et al. seems more appropriate for an application in practice.

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Abbreviations

\(\dot{\varepsilon }_{1}\) :

Axial strain rate

C c :

Compression index

\(\sigma^{\prime}_{1}\) :

Effective axial stress

\(\sigma^{\prime}_{3}\)::

Effective confining stress

ICU:

Isotropically consolidated undrained

q max :

Maximum deviator stress

q f :

Deviator stress at failure

MMC:

Macau marine clay

OC:

Over-consolidated

OCR:

Over-consolidation ratio

\(\Delta u_{{\text{f}}}\) :

Excess pore pressure at failure

β and ρ :

Parameters to describe shear strength

SRT:

Step-changed shearing rate test

SRR:

Step-changed shearing rate test combined with relaxation

\(S_{{\text{u}}}\) :

Shear strength

C r :

Swell index

NC:

Normally consolidated

\(\sigma^{\prime }_{{\text{v}}}\) :

Vertical effective stress

\(\sigma^{\prime }_{{{\text{v}}0}}\) :

Vertical effective stress at the start of undrained shearing

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Acknowledgements

The research Grant MYRG066 (Y1-L2)-FST12-LMH from the Research Committee of the University of Macau is acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Shengshen Wu & Bisheng Wu

  2. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Macau, Macau, China

    Thomas Lok

  3. School of Civil Engineering, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Youwei Xu

  4. School of Civil Engineering, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

    Weigang Wang

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  1. Shengshen Wu
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  2. Thomas Lok
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  3. Youwei Xu
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  5. Bisheng Wu
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Correspondence to Shengshen Wu.

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Wu, S., Lok, T., Xu, Y. et al. Rate-dependent behavior of a saturated reconstituted clay under different over-consolidation ratios and sample variance. Acta Geotech. 16, 3425–3438 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-021-01293-8

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