ABSTRACT
Pressuremeter tests are an efficient tool to derive shear modulus of soils and its decay with shear strain. Non-linear behaviour of soils during cavity expansion, and its consequence on stress and shear modulus with the distance to the pressuremeter cavity have to be taken into account. This paper presents several methods based both on the monotonic loading and on subsequent unload-reload loops to derive shear modulus decay as a function of the shear strain for tests performed in saturated clays, where constant volume can be assumed, by means of several but distinct interpretation methods: i) retrofitting based on closed form solutions integrating the non-linear elastic behaviour, ii) comparisons to numerical modelling by finite difference analysis and iii) approaches integrating prior strains transformations. The different results are compared to each other and to other investigation tests providing the initial shear modulus G0 associated with very small shear strain levels, in order to validate the different interpretation methods.
