8.2 Isotropic compression and swelling
The general behaviour of soil during isotropic compression and swelling is illustrated
in Fig. 8.2. This shows soil in which the grains are loosely packed, initially at p
0 at
O compressed to A, unloaded to B and reloaded through C to D where the grains are
more densely packed. This behaviour is similar to that illustrated in Fig. 3.12 and C is
a yield point.
Soil compression is primarily caused by rearrangement of the grains and so the
stiffness will increase from loose states (where there are plenty of voids for grains to move into) to dense states (where there is much less opportunity for grains to
rearrange). As shown in Fig. 8.2, the stress–strain line is curved. Thus the mechanisms
of volume change in soils due to rearrangement of the grains largely accounts for the
non-linear bulk stiffness behaviour. For the unloading–reloading loop ABC the soil is
very much stiffer (i.e. the volume changes are less) than for first loading because the
grains will obviously not ‘un-rearrange’ themselves on unloading. Behaviour similar
to that shown in Fig. 8.2 is also found for soils which have weak grains (such as
carbonate or shelly sands) that fracture on loading. In this case most of the compression
during first loading is associated with grain fracture but obviously the grains do
not ‘unfracture’ on unloading. Soils which contain a high proportion of plastic clay
may swell significantly on unloading due to volume changes in the clay grains themselves.
From Eq. (3.12) the instantaneous bulk modulus at any point is the gradient of
the curve for first loading or for unloading or reloading, given by