ABSTRACT The stress resistant and deformation characteristics of fine-grained soils, especially soft clays are remarkably influenced by the soil softness. Therefore, it is important to utilize a model which can simulate the effects of this phenomenon accurately. A constitutive model must be able to balance among the number of parameters such as the process of parameters determination and the simplicity of the computational calculations. In the present research, the performance of the hardening model for soft soils is investigated. The main advantage of utilizing this model is reproduction of nonlinear behavior via mobilized shear strength and mobilized dilation parameters. The model has been calibrated by incorporating soft Bangkok clay data which have been derived from a CD triaxial test performed by previous researches. Due to extensive deformations of the soft clay, a function has been introduced in the calibration process to fit the model with the test data. For common engineering practices, where the problem is mainly solved by applying the shear stress, employing the mentioned function, leads to acceptable results.

Keywords