Benefit of Unsaturated Soil Mechanics Approach on the Modeling of Early-Age Behavior of Rammed Earth Building

Rammed earth has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint and limit the energy consumption in the building sector due to its sustainable characteristics. Still, its use is not generalized due to a lack of understanding of the material behavior, notably its sensitivity to water. The coupled hydro-mechanical behavior has been recently studied in the framework of unsaturated soil mechanics, using suction as the parameter to represent the hydric state. This dependency of the mechanical behavior on the hydric state leads to uncertainty of the drying period required to progress in the construction process. Notably, the drying period before building the next floor is unknown. To determine the drying period, thermo-hydro-mechanical coupled finite element method simulations were carried out on a single wall by using the unsaturated soil mechanics approach and safety criterion recommendations from the practical guide for rammed earth construction in France. It was determined that it takes significant time for the construction of additional floor both in ‘summer-like’ and ‘winter-like’ environmental conditions, whereas the walls were far away from the ultimate failure state. Thus the drying periods were overestimated. It was concluded that the safety criterion from the practical guide is very conservative and drying periods can be reduced without significantly compromising the safety factor.

A Numerical Model to Study the Response of Piles under Lateral Loading in Unsaturated Soils

The interaction between a laterally loaded pile and the surrounding soil is typically limited to the shallower soil layer. Often, this zone is above the water table and therefore the interaction takes place under unsaturated conditions. The available evidence is scarce but suggests that unsaturated conditions play a major role on the pile’s response. The actual mechanisms governing the soil–pile interaction under unsaturated soil conditions are not understood entirely, and this paper provides a useful insight on this topic. The analysis is carried out with a fully coupled three-dimensional numerical model, the soil behaviour is simulated with a Modified Cam Clay Model extended to unsaturated conditions. The model accounts for the increase in stiffness and strength of unsaturated soils as well as the volumetric collapse upon wetting. The constitutive model is calibrated on the laboratory data and validated against centrifuge data with satisfying agreement. The results highlight the substantial differences in the soil reaction against the pile depending on different water saturation profiles. The study also shows that the influence of unsaturated conditions on the pile response increases as the pile’s flexibility increases. Comparing the findings with currently available design methods such as the p–y curves, it is found that these do not adequately describe the unsaturated soil reaction against the pile, which opens the door for new research in the field. The proposed numerical model is a promising tool to further investigate the mechanisms underlying the soil–pile interaction under unsaturated soils.