Improving Constitutive Modelling of Soft Organic Clays With New Experimental Insight

The engineering response of soft organic clays is controlled by anisotropy, stress history and the nature of organic matter. The behaviour of these soils has been investigated extensively over compression triaxial paths, and models are available to successfully reproduce available experimental observations. However, open questions remain about the response over stress paths other than compression. In this study, an organic diatomaceous clay from the Netherlands was subjected to an extensive experimental programme, which included monotonic and non-monotonic axis-symmetric stress paths in both compression and extension. The comprehensive study introduces a new dataset to support the development and calibration of constitutive approaches. The collected experimental data revealed some limitations in current elastic–plastic models, which were addressed by introducing greater flexibility in the shape of the yield function and enhancing previous rotational hardening rules. The new model, named JMC-clay, is assessed and validated over a variety of stress paths. The comparison between experimental data and numerical simulations demonstrates the ability of the model to accurately describe the pre-failure behaviour. The findings emphasise that the model performance is particularly sensitive to elastic–plastic compressibility more than any other parameter. It is suggested that the true bottleneck in the practical implementation of this class of anisotropic formulations is their accurate initialisation, rather than calibration.