Elasto-plastic model for cement-treated sand

This paper presents an elasto-plastic model for non-linear analyses of cement-treated sand. Various laboratory tests were systematically carried out to investigate the pre-peak and post-peak behaviours of a cement-treated sand. On the basis of these experimental results, the new model was built within the framework of a relatively simple elasto-plastic theory. Two failure criteria are employed to express tensile and shear failure characteristics observed in the experimental results of the cement-treated sand. The proposed model can describe strain-hardening and strain-softening responses under both failure modes. In the strain-softening rules, the smeared crack concept is used, and a characteristic length is considered to avoid the issue of mesh-size dependency. Since the failure criterion and strain-hardening/softening rules are based on the experimental evidences, the model is relatively easy to understand and the parameters used in the model have clear physical meaning. The proposed model was applied to simulate the behaviour of cement-treated sand in various laboratory tests, allowing for a reasonable comprehensive evaluation. It was demonstrated that the proposed model is suitable for describing both the tensile and shear failure behaviours of cement-treated sand.