A Capped Constitutive Model for Frozen-Thawed soil

Abstract Roadbeds usually experience various freezing and thawing regimes. Thus, in the present study, an experiment was performed comprising 46 successive triaxial tests conducted under different confining pressures and freezing regimes to develop a constitutive model capable of predicting the behavior of soil under different freezing regimes. Then, some novelties were introduced to improve the performance of the constitutive model. The novelties were providing a generalized strain and stress tensor including temperature as an extra-variable, introducing a capped yield surface responsible for thermal and mechanical strains, separately and finally, generating a linearized integration technique to provide the simultaneous thermal and mechanical loadings. A comparison between the numerically predicted results and existing experimental data demonstrated a reasonable performance under the accepted conditions. However, some further studies are needed to cover the relatively biased predictions in large deformations.