Analysis of the collapse behaviour of a natural soil using the Barcelona Basic Model

Abstract

The analysis of the hydro-mechanical and microstructural behaviour of a natural collapsible silty clay is presented in this paper. The analysis allowed concluding that a conventional model can be applied for the levels of stress and deformations considered in the study without the need of the application of complex models, which consider hydro-mechanical coupling. The model used in this paper was the BBM, proposed by Alonso et al. (1990), which also allows simulating diverse behavioural features of collapsible soils. Furthermore, through the analyses, it was possible to validate the proposal of Futai(1997), which suggested different values of r and pc (soil parameters of the BBM), hence rectifying a problem in the original model, which made difficult the simulation of a maximum collapse value. Finally, experimental results were satisfactory simulated through the BBM model and with parameters in accordance with the proposal of Futai (1997).