ABSTRACT

The incidence of vertisoils has been observed in the semi-arid region of the northeast of Brazil One of the most important characteristic of these soils is the presence of highly expansive clay and the property of contracting and fissuring during drying process, and swelling during wetting. This paper presents a numerical analysis of the volume change behavior of a vertisoil from Petrolândia-PE-Brazil, due to changes in the water content at different stress level. A coupled hydro-mechanical formulation, implemented in the computational code CODE_BRIGHT was applied to simulate conventional and suction controlled edometric tests performed with this soil. The constitutive model used is the double structure generalized plasticity model proposed by Sanchez et al. (2005). Comparison between experimental data and output results of numerical simulations shows a good agreement, checking the capability of the Model and the computer code to deal with hydro-mechanical behavior of expansive soils.