Constitutive Modeling for Biocemented Calcareous Sands
Yang Xiao, Hao Cui, Musharraf Zaman, Jinquan Shi, Huanran Wu
Abstract
Microbially induced calcite precipitation is an environment-friendly method for improving stiffness, strength, and dilatancy of loose or weak soils. Although many experimental studies have been performed on biocemented sands, few efforts have been devoted to establishing constitutive models for such materials. A critical-state-based bounding-surface model for biocemented sands was proposed in this research. An exponential equation of the plastic deviatoric strain was used to describe the degradation in a biocemented bond. The established model was applied to predict the drained triaxial test results of biocemented calcareous sands at different confining pressures and biocementation levels. We found that the current proposed biocemented model can well predict the softening and dilation of biocemented calcareous sands.