Consolidation of a Soft Clay Composite: Experimental Results and Computational Estimates

This paper deals with the problem of the consolidation of a composite consisting of alternate layers of soft clay and a granular material. A series of experiments were conducted on components to develop the constitutive models that can be implemented in a computational approach. The constitutive response of the soft clay is represented by a poro-elasto-plastic Cam clay-based model and the granular medium by an elasto-plastic model with a Drucker-Prager type failure criterion and a non-associated flow rule. The computational poro-elasto-plastic model is used to calibrate the experimental results derived from the one-dimensional tests and to establish the influence of the volume fractions and spatial arrangement of the soft clay and the granular material on the consolidation response. The computational developments are extended to examine certain idealized situations involving clay inclusions that are distributed within a granular medium in a regular arrangement.