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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Geohazards and Georisks
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2024.1483314

Axisymmetric consolidation behavior of multilayered unsaturated soils with transversely isotropic permeability

Provisionally accepted
Shen Lu Shen Lu 1,2*Bin Qian Bin Qian 3Liuyang Li Liuyang Li 4
  • 1 School of Civil Engineering, Wanjiang University of Technology, Ma’anshan 243031, Anhui, China
  • 2 Ma'anshan Engineering Technology Research Center of Land Test Evaluation and Restoration, Ma’anshan 243031, Anhui, China
  • 3 Geotechnical Engineering Department, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, Nanjing, China
  • 4 China Construction Eighth Engineering Division Co., Ltd., Shanghai 200135, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Time-dependent consolidation behavior of unsaturated soils is a vital problem in the geotechnical engineering. With the aid of the Fredlund consolidation theory, this work further assumes the total stress of soils skeleton freely change, and extends the Fredlund consolidation theory to a Biot-type theory, establishing the fully-coupled equation model of multilayered unsaturated poroelastic media with transversely isotropic permeability. To convert the partial differential governing equation into ordinary differential equations, the integration transform technology is applied. Subsequently, the precise integration method is used to acquire the time-dependent consolidation solution of multilayered unsaturated media with transversely isotropic permeability in the transformed domain, which is further solved in the actual domain by the inverse Hankel transform. A verification examples is provided to compare the present results with the existing work in the literature, showing a great coincidence and proving the feasibility of the present solution. Finally, numerous numerical examples are presented to investigate the evolution of excess pore pressure and settlement under quasi-static loads, revealing the consolidation behavior of unsaturated soils. The results demonstrates that the ramping time, stratification, permeability, depth and have a significant effect on the consolidation behavior.

    Keywords: Unsaturated media, consolidation, Semi-analytical solution, Transverse isotropy, multilayered soils

    Received: 19 Aug 2024; Accepted: 21 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Lu, Qian and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Shen Lu, School of Civil Engineering, Wanjiang University of Technology, Ma’anshan 243031, Anhui, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.