Failure behavior of cement-treated soil under triaxial tension conditions

Drained triaxial tension tests were conducted to investigate the tensile and shear failure behaviors of cement-treated soils under effective confining pressures. In the tests, tensile force was applied on saturated cement-treated soil specimens at effective confining pressures. The experimental result for a cement-treated soil shows that tensile failure occurred at low effective confining pressures, while shear failure occurred at high effective confining pressures. Based on experimental evidence, a failure criterion for cement-treated soil is discussed. In this study, tensile failure is assumed to be dominated by the effective minor principal stress and the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion is adopted for shear failure. The observed stress states at failure lie on the failure criterion consisting of the tensile and shear failure surfaces, indicating that the proposed failure criterion is suitable for cement-treated soils. The experimental results provide a good understanding of the failure behavior of cement-treated soils that exhibit tensile and shear failure modes.