Incorporating anisotropy in the Barcelona basic model

Abstract

The paper presents an elasto-plastic model for unsaturated soils that extends the Barcelona basic model to introduce a dependency of mechanical behaviour on material anisotropy. The model builds upon a previous proposal by Al-Sharrad and Gallipoli [1] by linking material anisotropy to both the distortion and aspect ratio of the elliptical yield curve in the constant suction plane of deviator versus mean net stress. In order to take into account anisotropic behaviour, an additional constitutive equation is therefore proposed to uniquely relate the aspect ratio and the distortion of the yield ellipse. The new model is calibrated and validated against the experimental data by Al-Sharrad [2] via the simulation of triaxial tests conducted at various suctions on compacted kaolin samples. These simulations show that the new model predicts yield stresses and shear strains during anisotropic loading with greater accuracy compared to the model of Al-Sharrad and Gallipoli [1].