Assessment of NorSand’s Performance under Zero Strain Boundary Conditions

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_35How to use a DOI?

Keywords

NorSand; Constitutive Modelling; Simple Shear; Boundary Conditions

Abstract

The NorSand constitutive model is a simple critical state based plasticity model which uses a small number of material parameters, with physical meanings, which are easily obtainable from triaxial compression tests. NorSand has seen many applications in geotechnical engineering, including static liquefaction of mine tailings, offshore anchors, and buried pipelines. NorSand is also readily available for use in popular geotechnical engineering software, including RS2 and RS3.

NorSand performs very well in replicating drained and undrained triaxial compression tests, which are often considered the standard for validation, but struggles to accurately predict soil behaviour in loading modes such as one-dimensional consolidation and direct simple shear where zero total strain boundary conditions are applied to the material. In this paper, NorSand’s constitutive relations are analytically examined using single element simulations of loading modes with zero total strain boundary conditions. When considering the mechanics of single element simulations, zero strain boundaries introduce additional unknowns into the system of equations to be solved and reduce constraints on the stress path. The systems of equations created by combining the model and boundary conditions together are analyzed to examine how stresses and strains can develop under different degrees of confinement, and which essential aspects of soil behaviour can and cannot be replicated well by NorSand under these conditions.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wyatt Handspiker
AU  - João Paulo de Sousa Silva
AU  - Alireza Azami
AU  - Mason Ghafghazi
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/07
TI  - Assessment of NorSand’s Performance under Zero Strain Boundary Conditions
BT  - Proceedings of the Rocscience International Conference 2025 (RIC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 359
EP  - 367
SN  - 2589-4943
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_35
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_35
ID  - Handspiker2025
ER  -