Practical method and application study for predicting cyclic accumulative deformations of the saturated soft clay

The distribution of saturated soft clay is greatly wide in China. The current main measures adopted to deal with soft soil foundations may lead to environmental pollution, even some engineering accidents may happen on soft soil foundations. In order to solve engineering problems of saturated soft soil foundations well, researches of mechanical properties of them are necessary. One of the most important mechanical characteristics of saturated soft clay is its cyclic accumulative deformation under cyclic loadings. For saturated soft clay, the cyclic accumulative deformation is similar to the creep behavior under static loadings. Therefore, the cyclic accumulative deformation is equivalent to the creep, the number of loading cycles is seen as the time, and this study develops a practical method for predicting the cyclic accumulative deformation of saturated soft clay with the creep theory. The method is a pseudostatic elasto-plastic finite element method implemented by ABAQUS software. A fitted equation between cyclic accumulative strain and number of loading cycles and the empirical relationship of parameters of fitted equation were established with a series of cyclic triaxial compression tests. Then with this empirical relationship of parameters, the method developed by this study was employed to predict the cyclic accumulative deformation under cyclic triaxial tension tests. Predicted results were in good agreement with test results, and the effectiveness of this method was thus validated for different stress states. The method was then applied in analyzing the cyclic accumulative deformation for soft soil foundation of a pile-supported wharf structure.