Analysis of cement-treated clay behavior by micromechanical approach

Abstract

Experimental results show the significant influence of cement content on the mechanical properties of cement-treated clays. Cementation is produced by mixing a certain amount of cement with the saturated clay. The purpose of this paper is to model the cementation effect on the mechanical behavior of cement-treated clay. A micromechanical stress-strain model is developed considering explicitly the cementation at inter-cluster contacts. The inter-cluster bonding and debonding during mechanical loading are introduced in two ways: an additional cohesion in the shear sliding and a higher yield stress in normal compression. The model is used to simulate isotropic compression and undrained triaxial tests under various confining stresses on cement-treated Ariake clay and Singapore clay with various cement contents. The applicability of the present model is evaluated through comparisons between numerical and experimental results. The evolution of local stresses and local strains in inter-cluster planes are discussed in order to explain the induced anisotropy due to debonding at contact level under the applied loads. The numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed micromechanical approach is well adapted for taking into account the main physical properties of cement-treated clay, including damage and induced anisotropy under mechanical loading.

Keywords

microstructure / cementation / clay / micromechanics / anisotropy / debonding

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Acknowledgements

This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41240024 and 50879058), the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (Grant No. 20110073120012), the Shanghai Pujiang Talent Plan (Grant No. 11PJ1405700), and the ANR-NSFC project RISMOGEO (Grant No. 51161130523).

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg