Authors: Abdelkabir Maqsoud Bruno Bussière Michel Aubertin Mamert Mbonimpa
Publish Date: 2012/06/01
Volume: 30, Issue: 5, Pages: 1147-1159
Abstract
The water retention curve WRC which represents the relationship between volumetric water content θ and suction ψ is required to analyze the hydrogeotechnical response of unsaturated soils The laboratory or field determination of the WRC can however be time consuming and difficult to conduct A practical alternative particularly useful at the preliminary stages of a project is to estimate the WRC using a predictive model based on basic geotechnical properties that are easy to obtain One common limitation of such predictive models is due to hysteresis effects which are not taken into account by most of these models The authors present in this paper an extended version of the Modified Kovács MK predictive model that incorporates hysteresis of the WRC along different paths including the main wetting and drying curves and the wetting and drying scanning curves for granular soils The model formulation is presented and predictions are compared to experimental data obtained on different granular soils The results show a good agreement for the main and scanning curves
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