What distinguishes soil behaviour from other civil engineering materials?
Examples are quite easy to point to. A soil slope can fail both due to being
overloaded and due to rainfall. What is happening here? Would we consider
a concrete structure (where particles are cemented together throughout) to
behave any differently when wet than dry? The key mechanical concept in
soil strength is friction and both of the slope failures can be explained by
considering this physical phenomenon. The other major distinguishing feature
of soil is that it is a multi-phase material, i.e. it contains soil grains, water
and sometimes in addition, air. When it contains only soil grains and water
it is termed saturated (i.e. all the voids in the soil are fi lled with water) and
this is assumed to be so in the majority of cases considered by engineers in
design. Two commonly used measures of soil state are usefully stated at this
point. Firstly, the degree of saturation of a soil sample is given by:
S
V
r V
Vw
Vv
=
[8.4]
where Vw is the volume of water and Vv is the volume of voids (i.e. Sr = 1
means full saturation). Water content is defined as:
w
m
m
w
s
=
[8.5]
where mw is the mass of water in a sample and ms is the mass of solids in
the sample.
It is now widely accepted that friction holds soils together, but before
applying this idea to soils we should consider simpler models of friction of
the type studied at school. Consider a block sitting on a fl at plane (Fig. 8.4).
The block is subjected to a horizontal force F but will move only when F
exceeds a certain value determined as:
F = mN [8.6]
where m is the coeffi cient of friction (a material property of the interface
between block and plane) and N is the normal force across the plane, perhaps
resulting from the block’s self-weight. The coeffi cient of friction can be
replaced with the tangent of an angle f as follows
F = N tan f [8.7]
where the angle is that made by the line of action of the reaction force from
the plane to the vertical. As the normal force is increased so the frictional
resistance to movement increases. As stated above, the majority of failures
in materials are due to shear strength being exceeded, and we can easily see
that the interface between the block and the plane is in shear, so that this
frictional model is itself a model of shear strength. The fi rst slope failure
mentioned above occurs due to overloading leading to shear stresses in
the slope exceeding the shear strength. The rainfall-induced failure cannot
however be explained in the same way as the applied load has not changed
so the shear stresses in the slope must be the same. The explanation is a
little more subtle and requires the concept of effective stress.