Stiffness degradation of natural fine grained soils during cyclic loading

Cyclic behavior of natural fine grained soils under a broad range of strains were investigated considering the effects of plasticity index and changes in confining pressures based on cyclic triaxial tests. A total of 98 stress controlled cyclic triaxial tests were conducted on normally consolidated and slightly overconsolidated samples. The investigation was divided into two parts. The first part consists of stress controlled cyclic triaxial tests under different stress amplitudes that were conducted to estimate the modulus reduction and the thresholds between nonlinear elastic, elasto-plastic and viscoplastic behavior. The second part involves the investigation of the undrained stress–strain behavior of fine grained soils under irregular cyclic loadings. The results showed that the elastic threshold is approximately equal to 90% of Gmax. Another transition point was defined as the flow threshold where the value of tangent of shear modulus ratio changes for the second time. Simple empirical relationships to estimate the dynamic shear modulus and damping ratio was formulated and compared with the similar empirical relationships proposed in the literature. The results provide useful guidelines for preliminary estimation of dynamic shear modulus and damping ratio values for fine grained soils based on laboratory tests.