Effects of drainage conditions on state parameter inversion from CPTu

1. Home
2. Publications
3. Online Library
4. Effects of drainage conditions on state parameter inversion from CPTu

The state parameter is a key descriptor to understand the potential soil vulnerability to liquefaction. State parameter is often inverted from CPTu readings, but inversion methods have been developed only for fully drained and fully undrained conditions. Therefore, the results are sensitive to partial drainage upon penetration. Cone penetration tests with pore pressure measurements (CPTu tests) in brittle, potentially liquefiable, soils are simulated by means of a code based on the Particle Finite Element Method and adapted for the analysis of fully hydromechanically-coupled geotechnical problems (G-PFEM). The brittle behaviour of the investigated soils is satisfactorily captured by employing the CASM constitutive model and a non-local regularization technique is adopted to prevent the pathological mesh dependence associated with continuum analyses of problems involving softening materials. CPTu tests are simulated for soils characterised by different degree of brittleness, investigating the role played by hydraulic conductivity, and so by various drainage conditions. The availability of a full numerical solution to explore aspects of soil response during penetration, which are not possible when only global CPTu response is available, is exploited. 

10th European Conference on Numerical Methods in Geotechnical Engineering (NUMGE2023)

2. Finite element, finite difference, discrete element, material point and other methods