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Water
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Recent Advancements in Unsaturated Soil Mechanics
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Recent Advancements in Unsaturated Soil Mechanics

A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Hydraulics and Hydrodynamics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 February 2024) | Viewed by 4420

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Arman Khoshghalb

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Interests: unsaturated soils; porous media; numerical modelling; meshfree methods; soil water retention curve; soil constitutive modeling

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Unsaturated soils account for a large portion of the Earth’s land surface. Many routine civil engineering projects deal with unsaturated soils. Examples include soil compaction in roads, dams, and embankments, soil characterization, slope stability assessment, and many others. Although research on unsaturated soils began in the 1950s, and considerable advances have been achieved in the numerical and constitutive modeling, experimental investigation, and field monitoring of unsaturated soils, the application of unsaturated soil mechanics in the practice of geotechnical engineering is still limited. This is partly due to the inherent complexities associated with the behavior of unsaturated soils. The uptake of unsaturated soil mechanics in the geotechnical engineering practice has also been hampered by the confusing nature of some of the models proposed for the behavior of unsaturated soils. The aim of this Special Issue is to address these issues by bringing together recent advances in the field of unsaturated soil mechanics, for the benefits of researchers and practicing engineers who work in this area. This Special Issue will cover a wide range of topics related to unsaturated soil mechanics, including numerical simulations, analytical development, and experimental investigations.

Dr. Arman Khoshghalb
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • unsaturated soils
  • soil water retention curve
  • constitutive modelling
  • matric suction
  • numerical modeling

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

29 pages, 6471 KiB  
Article
Load-Settlement Analysis of Axially Loaded Piles in Unsaturated Soils
by Zahra Gharibreza, Mahmoud Ghazavi and M. Hesham El Naggar
Water 2024, 16(2), 337; https://doi.org/10.3390/w16020337 - 19 Jan 2024
Viewed by 1037
Abstract
Unsaturated soil covers a significant part of the world, and studying the behavior of deep foundations in this medium is an important step in increasing accuracy and economic efficiency in geotechnical studies. This paper presents an analytical solution to investigate the load-carrying characteristics [...] Read more.
Unsaturated soil covers a significant part of the world, and studying the behavior of deep foundations in this medium is an important step in increasing accuracy and economic efficiency in geotechnical studies. This paper presents an analytical solution to investigate the load-carrying characteristics of single piles embedded in unsaturated soils, accounting for the effect of groundwater level on the pile’s response. For this purpose, relationships for shear modulus and Poisson’s ratio for unsaturated soils were collected from the literature to consider their effects as key parameters on pile performance. A parametric study was conducted to evaluate the effect of soil moisture content on the behavior of the pile-soil system for different soil types, and the effect of pile slenderness on its load-settlement behavior was studied for varying soil moisture contents. The results indicate that the pile stiffness increases as the soil suction increases while below a critical slenderness value, hence increasing the pile load capacity. However, this improvement occurs within a limited range of soil suction that is narrower for coarse-grained soils. The pile settlement corresponding to soil failure was also evaluated by modifying the existing solutions for unsaturated soils. The developed solutions were verified against the predictions of published solutions as well as the results of finite element analysis and pile load tests. It was found that the system stiffness decreases by 50% when the water table rises from the pile toe level to the ground surface in the studied soil. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advancements in Unsaturated Soil Mechanics)
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10 pages, 2778 KiB  
Communication
Vapour Multicycle Sorption of a Cement–Bentonite Cutoff Wall Material: Hysteresis Effects
by Sarah Al-Baiaty and Abdelmalek Bouazza
Water 2023, 15(13), 2469; https://doi.org/10.3390/w15132469 - 5 Jul 2023
Viewed by 917
Abstract
This paper examines the effects of multicycles of desorption/adsorption on the water isotherms of a typical cement–bentonite mixture. These water isotherms were evaluated over a relative humidity (RH) range of 90% and 0.3%. This study shows that, after the first adsorption–desorption cycle, the [...] Read more.
This paper examines the effects of multicycles of desorption/adsorption on the water isotherms of a typical cement–bentonite mixture. These water isotherms were evaluated over a relative humidity (RH) range of 90% and 0.3%. This study shows that, after the first adsorption–desorption cycle, the subsequent cycle shifted the water isotherm curves upward, particularly at RH < 70%, with a high degree of hysteresis. In contrast, at RH > 70%, the water isotherm curves shifted slightly downward with a low degree of hysteresis. The overall degree of hysteresis slightly decreased with the subsequent cycles. It is postulated that multi-adsorption–desorption cycles led to microstructural changes in the CB porous system as the CB material’s water retention ability was enhanced by increasing isotherm cycles. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advancements in Unsaturated Soil Mechanics)
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17 pages, 5864 KiB  
Article
Hydraulic Conductivity Characteristics of a Clayey Soil Incorporating Recycled Rubber and Glass Granules
by Miao Yu, Yilin Gui and Ryan Laguna
Water 2023, 15(11), 2028; https://doi.org/10.3390/w15112028 - 26 May 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1646
Abstract
Recycled waste materials have been employed to stabilize clayey soil by many practitioners in geotechnical engineering. However, the effects on hydraulic conductivity and its underlying mechanism have rarely been explored. The study aims to examine the hydraulic conductivity characteristics of soil reinforced with [...] Read more.
Recycled waste materials have been employed to stabilize clayey soil by many practitioners in geotechnical engineering. However, the effects on hydraulic conductivity and its underlying mechanism have rarely been explored. The study aims to examine the hydraulic conductivity characteristics of soil reinforced with the inclusion of selected recycled waste granules, rubber crumb (RC) and crushed glass (CG) under changing confinement. For this purpose, a series of consolidation tests were carried out by varying recycled waste type and additive contents (0%, 5%, 10% and 20% additive content by dry weight of soil). The confining stress was increased within a range of 6.25 kPa to 200 kPa. The results reveal that the addition of RC and CG, as well as the stress state, significantly impacted the soil’s hydraulic conductivity (k). The hydraulic conductivity of both RC/CG soil composites consistently declined with increasing applied stress. Moreover, as the concentration of recycled waste granules in the reinforced soil increased, the hydraulic conductivity value k initially increased, reaching a peak before subsequently declining. Additionally, the study utilized scanning electron microscope (SEM) imaging, which revealed that the inclusion of RC and CG significantly influenced hydraulic conductivity-related parameters by modifying pore size and distribution. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advancements in Unsaturated Soil Mechanics)
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