Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book consists of four parts–one on preliminaries, a second on shear, a third on consolidation and creep, and a fourth on applying the model to solve real world problems using Finite Element Analysis. It deals with the phenomenological model; a model that describes observed shear behavior, i.e., the phenomena of soil shear, without trying to model the physical processes that underlie and drive such behavior. The book highlights the strain-rate behavior of soils in shear, in the context of dynamical systems theory. It generalizes the dynamical systems soil theory and shows how to use it to derive the well-known linear relationship between void ratio and the log of the effective vertical stress seen in one-dimensional consolidation. The book describes the underlying physical bases of this phenomenological model.