NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF THE BEHAVIOR OF AN EXPANSIVE SOIL

This paper presents a numerical analysis of the behavior of an expansive soil of the semi-arid region of the northeast of Brazil. The behavior of expansive soils, due to applied stress or suction, is governed by various phenomena occurring at microstructural level. Gens & Alonso (4) presented a conceptual basis for modeling expansive soil, considering two differ- ent levels: the microstructural level, at which swelling of active minerals takes place and the macrostructural level responsible for major structural rearrangement. Based on this conceptual framework and in the improvements suggested by Alonso et al. (2), Sanchez et al. (5) pro- posed a double structure generalized plasticity model, which was implemented in the compu- tational code CODE_BRIGHT. This paper applies the coupled hydro-mechanical formulation implemented in this code to simulate the behavior of an expansive soil due to changes in wa- ter content. Output results of numerical simulations of laboratory tests show a good agree- ment with experimental data.