A simplified homogenisation method for composite soils

Abstract

Composite soil may consist of composite ground made up of soft soil reinforced by stiff soil columns or mixed soil made up of thoroughly mixed soft and stiff soils. In general, the behavior of composite soil is not well understood due to non-homogeneous structure of soil matrices. In this paper, a simplified homogenisation method is proposed to model the behavior of mixed soil and composite ground. It assumes that micro-stress/micro-strain is homogeneous in the matrix and the reinforcement of a composite soil and a localization tensor is developed. A microstructure knowledge-based model is proposed to distribute the micro-stress/micro-strain in each phase. This assumption largely simplifies the numerical procedure at the unit cell of composite soils. The validity of the proposed method is verified by comparing the predicted parameters with existing experimental data on mixed soils and composite grounds. Examples show that the proposed method can be applicable to well-randomly mixed soil and oriented composite ground. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.