Pore Pressure Accumulation of Anisotropically Consolidated Soft Clay Subjected to Complex Loads Under Different Stress Paths

Owing to different influence factors of foundation soil, the initial stress state of the soil under various working conditions is complex. To simulate this situation, in this paper, a series of tests on undisturbed soft clay under pure principal stress axis rotation were carried out by using the hollow cylinder apparatus (HCA). The influence of initial consolidation angle ζ (the angle between the vertical direction and direction of the applied load in consolidation) and intermediate principal stress coefficient b on pore water pressure accumulation of undisturbed soft clay were mainly studied. The test results show that, during pure principal stress axis rotation, the pore water pressure accumulation of the undisturbed soft clay fluctuates and increases with the rotation of the major principal stress; the values of major principal stress angles α , corresponding to the peak value of the pore water pressure in a certain cycle, are different with different initial consolidation angles; the pore water pressure accumulation of soft clay is greatly affected by the intermediate principal stress coefficient b. With the fixed initial consolidation angle ζ , the variation trend of the maximum pore water pressure for each cycle is appropriately the same with different b values. With the increase of cycles, the difference value of pore water pressure between b = 0 and b = 1 in each cycle increases gradually with different initial consolidation angles ζ . While with different initial consolidation angles ζ , the increase of the pore water pressure when b increases from 0 to 0.5 is different with that when b increases from 0.5 to 1; the variation of maximum pore water pressure with ζ is significantly affected by the value of b ; the value of maximum pore water pressure increases with the cycle number increases under all test conditions, but the growth rate decreases gradually. And the variation of maximum pore water pressure with the cycle number N is obviously influenced by both ζ and b .