Creep behaviour of an undisturbed lightly overconsolidated clay

Abstract

To fill an important gap in the knowledge of creep phenomena, the creep behaviour of the intact, overconsolidated Saint-Alban clay has been investigated by means of drained and undrained triaxial tests as well as of odometer tests.Creep deformations can be broken into volumetric and shear components. The development with time of both volumetric and shear strains can be represented by means of the phenomenological equation proposed by Singh and Mitchell in 1968. However, the stress function in that equation must be defined separately for each strain component and by reference to the limit state of the clay.A general model of the time dependent behaviour of clays might be obtained by combining the concepts of limit state and isotaches, as implied in the YLIGHT model proposed by Tavenas and Leroueil in 1977 but the effect of overconsolidation on the shape of the isotaches requires further investigation.