Visco-Hypoplastic Model For Pampean Loess.

Abstract

The visco-hypoplastic constitutive model is a powerful tool to represent the stressstrain
behavior of clayey soils in geotechnical engineering. The model is able to describe a
non-linear stress dependent stiffness, even for very high amplitudes of loading and unloading
cycles. The visco-hypoplastic equation for monotonic load-unload stress paths are physically
meaningful and the required soil-parameters can be determined from routine laboratory test.
The model is briefly described herein. The main purpose of this work is to explore the
capability of the viscohypoplastic model to approximate the stress-strain behavior of a
collapsible loess from the center of Argentina under oedometric and triaxial type of loading.
The experimental results were obtained for undisturbed samples of loess tested in a well
instrumented triaxial apparatus by means of local displacement transducers. The results
showed that the model approximated very well the experiments.