Behaviour of Solani sand under monotonic and cyclic loading: experiments and finite element simulations

This study presents the comparison of soil behaviour under undrained monotonic and cyclic loading for both dry and saturated conditions. An experimental study has been carried out on cyclic triaxial for medium dense Solani sand. These experimental evaluations are numerically simulated using finite element software PLAXIS-3D for similar properties of Solani sand. Before this, some of the results presented are verified by comparing with those published in literature. The validations have been done both for laboratory tests and numerical simulations for monotonic and cyclic loadings. Since, tests were carried out under undrained condition, major focus of study are on pore pressure generation for saturated samples and on particle re-arrangement for dry samples. The novelty of the paper lies in the finding that the behaviour of sandy soil in saturated state is different under monotonic and cyclic loadings.