Modelling the behaviour of an embankment on soft clay with different constitutive models

The paper investigates the effect of constitutive models on the predicted response of a simplified benchmark problem, an embankment on soft soil. The soft soil is assumed to have the properties of POKO clay from Finland and five different constitutive models are used to model the deposit. Two of the models are isotropic models, i.e. the Modified Cam Clay model and the Soft-Soil model. The other models are recently proposed constitutive models that account for plastic anisotropy. The S-CLAY1 and S-CLAY1S models are embedded in a standard elasto-plastic framework and account for anisotropy via a rotational hardening law. In addition, the S-CLAY1S model accounts for bonding and destructuration. In contrast, the Multilaminate Model for Clay (MMC) accounts for plastic anisotropy by utilizing so-called multilaminate framework. The results of numerical simulations show that accounting for anisotropy results in notable differences in the predicted settlements and horizontal movements compared to the predictions using the isotropic models. There are also significant differences in the K-0 predictions by the different constitutive models and this has a significant impact on the results. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.