Numerical inspection of Miner's rule and drained cyclic preloading effects on fine-grained soils

The prediction of soil cyclic behaviour is relevant for several geotechnical applications. In order to obtain accurate predictions of settlements and pore water pressure build-up on boundary value simulations, robust constitutive models which are able to realistically reproduce the soil mechanical behaviour under monotonic and cyclic loading are necessary. To have confidence on their predictions, their capabilities and limitations should be very well known. In this article, the prediction capabilities and limitations of two advanced constitutive models for fine-grained soils, namely: CAM and AHP+ISA were inspected considering undrained cyclic triaxial tests with more complex and realistic nature than "conventional" undrained cyclic tests usually considered in the literature for the calibration and validation of constitutive models but not representative of many real loading scenarios. In particular, the influence of drained cyclic preloadings and packages of cycles with different deviatoric stress amplitudes in different sequences (inspection of Miner's rule) was evaluated. For that purpose, simulation results with the models were qualitatively as well as quantitatively compared against several experimental results under monotonic and cyclic loading on Malaysian kaolin reported by Duque et al. (2022a).