Modeling the Dependency of Soil-Water Retention Curve on Volumetric Deformation

Abstract

Porous models are built using the current pore-size distribution of the material and can reproduce the phenomenon of hysteresis during wetting–drying cycles. The term current pore-size distribution means that the size of the pores is being updated as the soil deforms. This type of model can be used advantageously for the development of fully coupled hydromechanical constitutive models for unsaturated soils. Also, because the volumetric deformation affects the pore-size distribution of the soil, the influence of the former on the retention curves can be easily assessed. This paper presents a porous-solid model that simulates the hydraulic hysteresis of soils and the influence of the volumetric deformation on the soil-water retention curves. The precision obtained in numerical and experimental comparisons shows the adequacy of the model.