ABSTRACT
Triaxial tests are commonly used in soil mechanics to determine the shear strength of soils. In standard tests, either the development of volumetric strain is restricted (undrained), or the development of pore water pressure is inhibited (drained). In this work, a new approach to triaxial testing is proposed that couples the evolution of pore water pressure with the development of volumetric strain. The resulting unconventional strain and stress path is referred as a partially drained path. The experiments can be interpreted as true partially drained since time dependence due to pore water flow does not occur. This new approach offers a third possibility for conducting triaxial tests as element tests, besides fully drained or undrained tests. A series of monotonic tests were conducted on Karlsruhe fine sand. The obtained unconventional strain paths were simulated using Neohypoplasticity, a novel constitutive model for sand. The simulation results were evaluated concerning the experimental data. A good agreement between the experimental results and numerical calculations can be shown.
