Open Access

ARTICLE

Experimental and Numerical Investigation on the Tensile Fracture of Compacted Clay

Chengbao Hu^{1, 2, 3}, Liang Wang⁴, Daosheng Ling^{1, 2, 3, *}, Wujun Cai⁵, Zhijie Huang^{1, 2}, Shilin Gong^{1, 2, 3}

1 MOE Key Laboratory of Soft Soils and Geoenvironmental Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China.
2 Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China.
3 School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, Ningbo, 315100, China.
4 Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Miami, Coral Gables, 33123, USA.
5 Zhongnan Engineering Co., Ltd., Changsha, 410014, China.

* Corresponding Author: Daosheng Ling. Email: .

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Numerical Modeling and Simulation for Structural Safety and Disaster Mitigation)

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2020, 123(1), 283-307. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2020.07842

Received 03 July 2019; Accepted 09 October 2019; Issue published 01 April 2020

Abstract

This paper performed flexural test and numerical simulation of clay-beams with different water contents to study the tensile fracture of clay soil and the relevant mechanisms. The crack initiation and propagation process and the accompanied strain localization behaviors were all clearly observed and analyzed. The exponential cohesive zone model was proposed to simulate the crack interface behavior of the cohesivefrictional materials. The experimental results show that the bending capacity of claybeams decrease with the water content, while those of the crack mouth opening displacement, crack-tip strain and the strain localization range increase. The numerical predictions successfully reproduce the evolving tensile cracks and the strain localization phenomenon of the clay beams with different fracture ductility, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed cohesive zone model in modelling clay fractures.

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