An improved hypoplastic model incorporating intergranular strain for overconsolidated clay

Abstract

Abstract Hypoplastic constitutive models are able to describe overconsolidated behaviors of clay with a single nonlinear tensor function using a set of parameters. For instance, an advanced hypoplastic model by Wang and Wu (2020) has successfully reproduced overconsolidated history by incorporating a structure tensor. To simulate the recent stress history effects and the stiffness variations at small strains of clay, the intergranular strain tensor is introduced by Niemunis and Herle (1997) to reproduce stress-path dependent stiffness of clay. The improved hypoplastic model is examined against experiments on overconsolidated Chicago clay. It is evidently concluded that the improved model is capable of replicating stress-path dependency on the small-strain behavior of overconsolidated clay.