Dynamic propagation criteria for catastrophic failure in planar landslides

Quantitative assessment of the risk of submarine landslides is an essential part of the design process for offshore oil and gas developments in deep water, beyond the continental shelf. Landslides may be triggered by a reduction in shear strength of subsea sediments over a given zone, caused for example by seismic activity. Simple criteria are then needed to identify critical conditions whereby the zone of weakness could grow catastrophically to cause a landslide. A number of such criteria have been developed over the last decade, based either on ideas drawn from fracture mechanics, or considering the equilibrium of the initial weakened zone and adjacent process zones of gradually softening material. Accounting for the history of the weak zone initiation is critical for derivation of reliable propagation criteria, in particular considering dynamic effects arising from accumulating kinetic energy of the failing material, which will allow the failure to propagate from a smaller initial zone of weakened sediments. Criteria are developed here for planar conditions, taking full account of such dynamic effects, which are shown to be capable of reducing the critical length of the softened zone by 20% or more compared with criteria based on static conditions. A numerical approach is used to solve the governing dynamic equations for the sliding material, the results from which justify assumptions that allow analytical criteria to be developed for the case where the initial softening occurs instantaneously. The effect of more gradual softening is also explored. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A multisurface kinematic hardening model for the behavior of clays under combined static and undrained cyclic loading

In dynamic geotechnical problems, soils are often subjected to a combination of sustained static and fast cyclic loading. Under such loading conditions, saturated and normally consolidated clays generally experience a build-up of excess pore water pressure along with a degradation of stiffness and strength. If the strength of the soil falls below the static stress demand, a self-driven failure is triggered. In this paper, a constitutive model is presented for the analysis of such problems, based on a general multisurface plasticity framework. The hardening behavior, the initial arrangement of the surfaces, and the nonassociated volumetric flow rule are defined to capture important aspects of cyclic clay behavior. This includes nonlinear hysteretic stress-strain behavior, the effect of anisotropic consolidation, and the generation of excess pore water pressure during undrained cyclic loading along with a degradation of stiffness and strength. The model requires nine independent parameters, which can be derived from standard laboratory tests. A customized experimental program has been performed to validate the model performance. The model predictions show a good agreement with test results from monotonic and cyclic undrained triaxial tests, in particular with respect to the strain-softening response and the number of loading cycles to failure. A procedure for a general stress-space implicit numerical implementation for undrained, total stress-based finite element analyses is presented, including the derivation of the consistent tangent operator. Finally, a simulation of the seismic response of a submarine slope is shown to illustrate a possible application of the presented model.     

Geotechnical applications of chemically enhanced drainage

The paper explores application of the engineered increase in soil permeability, achieved using reaction of guanidinium solutions with smectite soils, to geotechnical problems. The comparison between the finite element analysis of the enhanced permeability model for axisymmetric conditions and a simplified analytical solution demonstrates the importance of accounting for diffusive and dispersive fluxes. In order to illustrate possible practical application of the proposed soil improvement technique, two geotechnical examples have been numerically explored: improving performance of a ground water well and the stabilization of a slope by chemically enhanced drainage. For the well application, it has been demonstrated that for a relatively small degree of treatment, the power consumption can be reduced to a half, compared with the non‐treated soil. For the slope stability application, the water table downstream of the drain can be significantly lowered using moderate pump/collector pressures at the centre of the drain, causing a higher increase in the factor of safety for a larger area subjected to the chemically enhanced drainage. The particularly promising result is that in both applications the largest gain in the well/drain efficiency has been observed for smaller chemically enhanced areas, where a short duration of treatment and small amounts of chemicals decrease the power consumption and increase the safety factor at the highest rate. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of pore water pressure dissipation on rate dependency of shear strength in localised failure of soils

The paper presents analytical solutions for the evolution of excess pore pressures in the vicinity of a shear band in a rate‐dependent, strain‐softening permeable soil, with the aim to explore, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the potential variation of failure shear stress in the shear band. The solutions encompass both dissipation of a pre‐existing pore pressure regime within the main soil domain, and the effects of generation of additional pore pressure within the shear band itself. The simplified analytical solutions were checked by numerical inversion of exact solutions in Laplace transform space, confirming their high accuracy. The solutions show that it is possible for the failure shear stress to rise initially because of short‐term dissipation of the pre‐existing excess pore pressure at a faster rate than generation of new excess pore pressure within the shear band. This apparent strain hardening in a strain‐softening soil can be misleading in that it can temporarily slow down the sliding mass and create a false sense of stabilization of the slope. It can also result in additional temporary shear resistance for sliding foundations or pipelines on the seabed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Kinematic hardening of soft clay in simple shear

In a separate paper, the authors have proposed a normalized, non-degrading form of the shear stress–shear strain relationship for undrained, cyclic simple shear of soft clay. This relationship is described in the present paper, and it is seen to include a single fatigue parameter—the mean effective stress. Application of the relationship therefore requires knowledge of the history of the mean effective stress during any loading history. The present paper proposes an effective stress path model which may be used for prediction of this history. The model is developed within the framework of bounding surface kinematic and isotropic hardening plasticity. It incorporates an isotropic hardening bounding surface, and a kinematic hardening yield surface, in which the elastic region vanishes, and so the yield surface reduces to the stress point. The normalized shear stress–shear strain relationship, developed on the basis of Iwan's model, is used to establish the shape of the cap of the bounding surface. A new translation rule is also incorporated in the model, allowing improved prediction of stress path development within the bounding surface during regular or irregular cyclic loading. Use of the proposed model to simulate the behaviour of soft clay in laboratory undrained cyclic simple shear tests shows excellent qualitative agreement, with most of the major features of the actual behaviour being predicted.     

Kinematic hardening plasticity formulation of small strain behaviour of soils

An objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the small strain model developed by the authors can be incorporated into the conventional kinematic hardening plasticity framework to predict pre‐failure defor mations. The constitutive model described in this paper is constituted by three elliptical yield surfaces in triaxial stress space. Two inner surfaces are rotated ellipses of the same shape, representing the boundaries of the linear elastic and small strain regions, while the third surface is the modified Cam clay large‐scale yield surface. Within the linear elastic region, the soil behaviour is elastic with cross‐coupling between the shear and volumetric stress–strain components. Within the small strain region, the soil behaviour is elasto‐plastic, described by the kinematic hardening rule with an infinite number of loading surfaces defined by the incremental energy criterion. Within the large‐scale yield surface, the soil behaviour is elasto‐plastic, described by kinematic and isotropic hardening of the small strain region boundary. Since the yield surfaces have different shapes, the uniqueness of the plastic loading condition imposes a restriction on the ratio between their semi‐diameters. The model requires 12 parameters, which can be determined from a single consolidated undrained triaxial compression test. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Depth integrated modelling of submarine landslide evolution

Landslides - Submarine landslides are a major geohazard among worldwide continental slopes, posing significant threats to offshore infrastructure, marine animal habitats and coastal urban centres....     

Numerical studies of hyperplasticity with single,multiple and a continuous field of yield surfaces

The development of a new constitutive model would normally require a new procedure to be established for derivation of the incremental response. However, for models generated within the framework of hyperplasticity (using single, multiple or continuous yield surfaces), this derivation can be carried out using standard procedures. In this paper we present first the unified incremental response for a model using a single internal variable for general loading conditions. Next, we develop and explore three different numerical techniques for implementation of this procedure. One of the approaches, which seems superior, is extended to the multi‐surface hyperplastic formulation. Finally, to allow integration of continuous hyperplastic models within the same multi‐surface hyperplastic setting, the issue of discretization of the continuous field of yield surfaces is addressed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of the constitutive relationship on seismic response of soils. Part II. The site amplification study

This paper is the first part of the general paper dealing with effects of constitutive modeling of cyclic stress–strain behavior of soils on site amplification. The paper concentrates on modeling of pseudo-static cyclic soil behavior in small to medium strain range. In order to fit the small strain data accurately, the chosen analytical stress–strain relationship should satisfy the specific small strain condition formulated for soils using the small strain data from the pseudo-static cyclic tests. Analysis of conventional relationships, in particular the Ramberg–Osgood (R–O) relationship, indicated that a failure to satisfy this condition lead to low accuracy of prediction of both tangent stiffness and damping ratio at small and medium strains. The logarithmic function originally proposed to describe static monotonic stress–strain behavior is applied to fit experimental cyclic backbone curves. Constructed to satisfy the formulated small strain condition for soils, this function has proven to be free from the limitations of the R–O and other relationships. When applied in combination with the Masing rules to predict damping ratios, it gives a good prediction in the small to medium strain range, where the Masing hypothesis is supported by experimental evidence.