Undrained Elastoplastic Solution for Cylindrical Cavity Expansion in Structured Cam Clay Soil Considering the Destructuration Effects

Soil structure has significant influences on the mechanical behaviors of natural soils, although it is rarely considered in previous cavity expansion analyses. This paper presents an undrained elastoplastic solution for cylindrical cavity expansion in structured soils, considering the destructuration effects. Firstly, a structural ratio was defined to denote the degree of the initial structure, and the Structured Cam Clay (SCC) model was employed to describe the subsequent stress-induced destructuration, including the structure degradation and crushing. Secondly, combined with the large strain theory, the considered problem was formulated as a system of first-order differential equations, which can be solved in a simplified procedure with the introduced auxiliary variable. Finally, the significance and efficiency of the present solution was demonstrated by comparing with the previous solutions, and parametric studies were also conducted to investigate the effects of soil structure and destructuration on the cavity expansion process. The results show that the soil structure has pronounced effects on the mechanical behavior of structured soils around the cavity. For structured soils, a cavity pressure that is larger than the corresponding reconstituted soils when the cavity expands to the same radius is required, and the effective stresses first increase to a peak value before decreasing rapidly with soil structure degradation and crushing. The same final critical state is reached for soils with different degrees of the initial structure, which indicates that the soil structure is completely destroyed during the cavity expansion. With the increase of the destructuring index, the soil structure was destroyed more rapidly, and the stress release during the plastic deformation became more significant. Moreover, the present solution was applied in the jacking of a casing during the sand compact pile installation and in situ self-boring pressuremeter (SBPM) tests, which indicates that the present solution provides an effective theoretical tool for predicting the behavior of natural structured soils around the cavity.

The effect of voids shape on hypervelocity cylindrical cavity expansion and shock waves formation in transversely isotropic porous materials

This paper investigates the steady-state dynamic radial expansion of a pressurized circular cylindrical cavity in an infinite porous medium modeled with the constitutive framework developed by Monchiet et al. (2008), which considers the material to display a periodic porous microstructure with spheroidal voids and matrix described by the orthotropic yield criterion of Hill (1948). For that purpose, we have extended the formulation of dos Santos et al. (2019) to consider oblate and prolate voids, which allows to assess the role of the initial voids shape on the elastoplastic-anisotropic fields that develop near the cavity. The theoretical development follows the cavity expansion formalism of Cohen and Durban (2013) and employs the artificial viscosity approach of Lew et al. (2001) to avoid singularities in the field variables due to the formation of plastic shock waves. The main outcome of this work is a relationship between the critical cavity expansion velocity for which plastic shocks emerge and the initial aspect ratio of the spheroidal voids. The results show that the formation of shocks is delayed for oblate voids, in comparison with spherical and prolate voids. These findings have been substantiated for different anisotropic behaviors and initial void volume fractions.

Theoretical solution for drained cylindrical cavity expansion in clays with fabric anisotropy and structure

This paper presents a novel, exact, semi-analytical solution for the quasi-static drained expansion of a cylindrical cavity in soft soils with fabric anisotropy and structure. The assumed constitutive model is the S-CLAY1S model, which is a Cam clay-type model that considers fabric anisotropy that evolves with plastic strains, structure and gradual degradation of bonding (destructuration) due to plastic straining. The solution involves the numerical integration of a system of eight first-order ordinary differential equations, three of them corresponding to the effective stresses in cylindrical coordinates, other three corresponding to the components of the fabric tensor and one corresponding to the amount of bonding and another corresponding to the specific volume. The solution is validated against finite element analyses. When destructuration is considered, the solution provides slightly lower values of the effective radial and mean stresses near the cavity wall. Besides, the specific volume is further reduced due to loss of bonding. Parametric analyses and discussion of the influence of soil overconsolidation, expansion of the cavity and initial amount of bonding are presented.

Dynamic finite cylindrical cavity-expansion models for cellular steel tube confined concrete targets normally impacted by rigid sharp-nosed projectiles

Cellular steel-tube-confined concrete (CSTCC) targets show improved anti-penetration performance over single-cell STCC targets due to the confinement effect of surrounding cells on the impacted cell. Dynamic finite cylindrical cavity-expansion (FCCE) models including radial confinement effect were developed to predict the depth of penetration (DOP) for CSTCC targets normally penetrated by rigid sharp-nosed projectiles, and stiffness of radial confinement was achieved with the elastic solution of infinite cylindrical shell in Winkler medium. Steady responses of dynamic FCCE models were obtained on the assumption of incompressibility of concrete, failure of comminuted zone with Heok–Brown criterion and two possible response modes of the confined concrete in the impacted cell. Furthermore, a DOP model for CSTCC targets normally impacted by rigid projectiles was also proposed on the basis of the dynamic FCCE approximate model. Lastly, relevant penetration tests of CSTCC targets normally penetrated by 12.7 mm armor piecing projectile (APP) were taken as examples to validate the dynamic FCCE models and the corresponding DOP model. The results show that the DOP results based on dynamic FCCE model agree well with those of the CSTCC targets normally penetrated by rigid conical or other sharp-nosed projectiles.