Unified hardening (UH) model for unsaturated expansive clays

In this paper, by introducing a new yielding mechanism based on the widely acknowledged double-structure theory, the original UH model for unsaturated soils is extended to capture the behaviour of expansive clays. A novel expansion potential is further established to evaluate the effect of overconsolidation on the volume change of unsaturated expansive clays during wetting. With only one additional parameter, the proposed model can describe the behaviour of both wetting-collapse and wetting-induced swelling for unsaturated clays. Comparisons between model predictions and test results show a good agreement which verifies the capability of the proposed model in charactering the features of unsaturated expansive clays under various stress histories and stress paths.