ABSTRACT
Predicting the macroscopic behaviour of saturated soils involves lots of difficulties, some of which are due to the multiphase character of such a medium where solid and liquid parts are intimately mixed. and interact in an intricate manner under unsteady or cycling loading conditions. Soils always appear strongly heterogeneous at small length scale owing to the great complexity of their internal geometry, but they can generally be considered as quasi-homogeneous at macroscopic scale, in the sense that statistically they repeat themselves, more or less, in space.
