A family of improved yield surfaces and their application in modeling of isotropically over-consolidated clays

Recognizing the limitation of the existing yield surfaces for clays, a novel type of the yield surface is derived. The shape parameters allow for the distortion of the yield surface from an ellipse to a teardrop shape such that it provides more flexibility for better modeling the shear response for over-consolidated clays. A new bounding surface model has been proposed within a critical state framework, and can predict the realistic behavior of over-consolidated clays under both undrained and drained conditions. The capacity of the model is demonstrated by five different reconstituted clays with representative testing results in the literature. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.