Behavior of unsaturated cohesive-frictional soils over a whole range of suction/thermo-controlled stress paths and modes of deformation

Abstract

The present work documents some of the most recent experimental evidence of the thermohydro-mechanical behavior of compacted soils over a whole range of suction- and/or thermo-controlled stress paths and modes of deformation, including data from a series of triaxial, true triaxial, plane strain, ring shear, and resonant column tests conducted on different types of cohesive-frictional soils in the low-to-medium matric suction range under either room temperature or thermally controlled conditions. The work has been accomplished at the Advanced Geomechanics Laboratory of the University of Texas at Arlington, focusing primarily on the following essential features of unsaturated soil behavior: (1) Loading-collapse and apparent tensile strength loci assessed from suction-controlled triaxial and true triaxial testing on clayey sand, (2) Critical state lines from suction-controlled plane strain testing on silty soil, (3) Peak and residual failure envelopes from suction-controlled ring shear testing on clayey soil, (4) Frequency response curves and cyclic stress-strain hysteretic loops from thermo-controlled, constant-water content resonant column testing on clayey soil, and (5) Residual failure envelopes from suction/thermo-controlled ring shear testing on clayey soil. The work is intended to serve as a succinct yet reasonably thorough state-of-the-art paper contribution to PanAm-UNSAT 2021: Third Pan-American Conference on Unsaturated Soils, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 21-25, 2021.