A Novel Model to Simulate the Behaviour of Cement-Treated Clay under Compression and Shear

Soft clay treated with cement shows an improvement on strength due to the chemical interaction between cement and clay particles. Laboratory results showed that the peak strength of the cement treated clay reduces as the mean effective stress increases due to the effect of cementation degradation. Therefore, in this paper, a constitutive model was developed to simulate the behaviour of cement treated clay. Based on the Critical State Soil Mechanics, the model proposed the non-linear failure envelope for the cement treated clay to merge with the Critical State Line (CSL) of the un-reinforced clay when the reinforced samples reach a sufficiently high stress levels. Moreover, a modified mean effective stress was proposed to include the contribution of cementation and its cementation degradation. Furthermore, the proposed model was evaluated by comparing the proposed model predictions against the Singapore clay treated with 10% cement available from the literature. The validation suggested that the proposed model can be used to predict the behaviour of cement treated clay very well.