ABSTRACT
Natural and compacted Boom clay have been extensively studied for their potential use as environmental barriers. In such applications, a series of coupled chemo-thermo-hydro-mechanical processes characterise the response of the soil, and advanced constitutive models are mandatory for a reliable description of its behaviour. The consequences of hydro-mechanical coupling are explored herein, from a constitutive point of view, starting from the analysis of few microstructure features of the natural and the compacted material, respectively. Numerical simulations of selected data are presented, coming from an extensive experimental programme performed at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. A fully coupled hydro-mechanical constitutive model, conceived in the framework of elastoplasticity with generalised hardening, is adopted to model the behaviour of the natural and the compacted Boom clay. It is shown that the same constitutive framework can be adopted for the two materials provided the differences in the retention mechanisms and in the evolution of anisotropic fabric are correctly taken into account.
