Thermodynamic framework for unsaturated granular soil

X.S. Li & X.J. Zhu

Department of Civil Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

ABSTRACT: The laws of thermodynamics govern the response of soil, in which each phase is treated as a
smeared continuum subjected to partial stress and actions from other constituents. For unsaturated soils, the
work done to the solid phase has not been well defined because the effective stress acting on soil skeleton has
not been well defined. Recent studies for unsaturated granular soil reveal that 1) the pore fluid pressure may
exert a shear effect on solids rendering the effective stress an additional deviatoric component, and 2) there is a
locked energy inside soil skeleton, and a reduction in suction may trigger a release of this part of energy. These
two findings may lead to a more rigorous thermodynamic framework for modeling the response of unsaturated
granular soils in the context of both boundary value problems and constitutive behavior. This paper reports some
preliminary findings in this line of research.

1 INTRODUCTION effective stress concept, attempts have been made to

The stress-strain-strength behavior of soil is governed
by thermodynamic laws, in which the work done to the
soil skeleton is governed by the intergranular forces
expressed in terms of a continuum quantity called
effective stress. Although the principle of effective
= effective stress, ij = total stress, ij =
stress marked the birth of modern soil mechanics and
is regarded as one of the most fundamental concepts in
nowadays geotechnical engineering practice, its defi-
nition and applicability to unsaturated soils have been
debated for over four decades and are still unset-
tled. As such, current unsaturated soil models are not
formulated within the framework of the fundamental
physical laws of thermodynamics thus are not as reli-
able as the elastoplastic saturated soil models that are
deeply rooted in thermodynamics.
To model unsaturated soil behavior in a rigorous
manner, the following two issues must be addressed:
1) a correct definition of effective stress in unsaturated
soil; and 2) a correct approach to apply thermodynamic
laws to unsaturated soil modeling.
This paper reports some preliminary findings on the
two issues.
2 BACKGROUND
The concept of effective stress plays a central role in
saturated soil mechanics. As described by Terzaghi
(1936), all the measurable effects of a change in
stress, such as compression, distortion, and a change
in shearing resistance, are exclusively due to changes
in the effective stress. Given the importance of the
derive a similar effective stress for unsaturated soils.
The most widely cited effective stress expression
was proposed by Bishop in 1959 as follows:
where ij
Kronecker delta, ua = pore air pressure, uw = pore
water pressure, and is an empirical parameter vary-
ing from zero for dry soil to unity for fully saturated
states. Similar expressions were proposed by others.
However, it was soon found that was not an intrinsic
quantity, rendering Eq. 1 or similar definitions unable
to fit into the established framework of soil mechanics
based on the principle of effective stress as described
by Terzaghi. In particular, the parameter is applica-
tion dependent. The value of determined for volume
change is found different from that for strength, and
the swelling/collapse behavior upon wetting cannot be
correctly described by a model using the definition
of Eq. 1.
This fundamental deficiency has led to abandon-
ment of the concept of effective stress in unsaturated
soil mechanics. Instead, the theory of two independent
stress variables (Bishop & Blight 1963; Fredlund &
Morgenstern 1977) gained popularity. The two stress
variables that are commonly used are:
Compared with the use of a single effective stress
variable as shown in Eq. 1, the adoption of two inde-
pendent stress variables (Eq. 2) has produced a more

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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
meaningful and flexible description of unsaturated soil
behavior but failed to yield an expression for a funda-
mental mechanical quantity the work done to the
soil skeleton, because the strain fields that are conju-
gated to ij and s in work done to the soil skeleton are
unknown.
The adoption of two stress variables has formed
a basis for the development of a class of constitu-
tive unsaturated soil models within the framework of
elastoplasticity (e.g., Alonso et al. 1990; Wheeler &
Sivakumar 1995). In those models, the concept of
loading-collapse surface (Alonso et al. 1990) is used.
In the concept, yielding is considered as a function of
the two stress variables given in Eq. 2. This class of
models has shown a certain level of success in con-
sistently describing shear failure and wetting induced
swelling/collapse phenomena. However, due partly to
the giving up of the concept of effective stress, the work
done to the soil skeleton has not been scientifically
defined. Consequently, the application of and vali-
dation against the fundamental thermodynamic laws,
which are the foundations of elasticity and plasticity
theories, are difficult, if not impossible. As a result,
in the models adopting the loading-collapse concept,
fundamental difficulties still remain. For example, the
concept of critical state, one of the most important
concepts in mainstream soil mechanics, defines the
ultimate failure state of a soil in which the stress and
soil volume are unchanged. However, such an impor-
tant concept has not been rigorously examined within
the framework of two stress variables. Can suction (a
stress variable) change in critical state? If the answer
is yes, then the plastic volumetric strain as well as the
net stress (another stress variable) may also change
(think about following a neutral path that connects all
the critical state points on a loading-collapse surface
in the p q s space, where p = ( 1 + 2 3 )/3 and stress-like quantity called the quasi-effective stress for
q = 1 3 are the net mean normal stress and the unsaturated soils, which is equivalent to the effective
deviatoric stress, respectively), which not only con-
tradicts the fundamental concept of critical state but
also violates a postulate in classical plasticity theory
that neutral loading produces no plastic deformation.
If the answer is no, then what will happen if wetting is
introduced during critical state deformation?
As a common practice of constitutive modeling
in rational mechanics, a more fundamental approach
for unsaturated soil modeling should be based on the
thermodynamic laws. Although constitutive modelers
in soil mechanics do not often develop their models
starting from thermodynamic laws, the elastoplasticity
framework they use has a deep root in classical thermo-
dynamics. The connection between thermodynamics
and elastoplasticity can be found in almost all text-
books of continuum solid mechanics and/or plasticity
(e.g., Lubliner 1990). In the history of soil mechan-
ics, the use of the concepts of thermodynamics has
resulted in one of the most important developments in
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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
the field the framework of critical state soil mechan-
ics and modeling (Roscoe & Burland 1968; Schofield
& Wroth 1968). Recently, the issue is revisited by some
researchers (e.g., Houlsby & Puzrin 2000; Collins &
Kelly 2002) in a more explicit and specific way. Their
work have demonstrated the generality and promising
features of explicit application of the thermodynamic
laws to soil modeling. However, their work have not
touched the issues stated earlier on the effect of suc-
tion and the definition of the effective stress, because
in their work it is implicitly assumed that the effec-
tive stress has already been welldefined and the pore
pressure does not separately affect the response of soil
skeleton. However, these assumptions are only true for
saturated or dry soils.
To extend the thermodynamic framework to unsat-
urated soils, further work on the definition of the
effective stress (must be conjugate in power with the
strain rate) and the impact of the suction on the internal
energy of the soil skeleton are needed.
3 EFFECTIVE STRESS
Based on the virtual work principle, a microstructural
analysis on unsaturated granular soil has been per-
formed (Li 2003). It was found that a fundamental
difference between saturated and unsaturated soils is
that, for saturated soils, the pore pressure acting on
each particle is automatically balanced and therefore
its net effect on particle contact shear vanishes; while
for unsaturated soils, the pore pressures acting on those
particles that are exposed partially to air and partially
to water are generally unbalanced, which subsequently
alters the particle contact shear forces. The important
conclusion drawn from this analysis is that there is a
stress for saturated soils in the sense that it governs
the deformation and failure of a soil skeleton in the
same way effective stress does in saturated soils. This
quasi-effective stress is the sum of the net stress tensor
and a suction associated tensor sFij , expressed as:
where
In Eq. 4, Sr is the degree of saturation, V is the vol-
ume of a representative volume element (RVE), N p
is the number of particles in the RVE, xicm represents
the centroid coordinate of the mth particle, Swm is the
portion of the surface of the mth particle that is in con-
tact with water, nj denotes unit outer normals on Swm ,

Contact
Pore Shear
Water
Figure 1. Illustration of suction-induced shear.
and lj represents the intensity as well as the direction
of the surface tension acting along the perimeters of
air-water menisci m on each particle, respectively.
The term sFij is, in essence, a fabric tensor of pore
fluid scaled by the suction, and this fabric tensor, Fij ,
characterizes the distribution of the pore pressures
inside the soil. This microstructural analysis proves
that it is impossible to define an effective stress for
unsaturated soil purely on the basis of continuum stress
variables or of any of their combinations that assign
a scalar (isotropic) identity to suction effect, as sug-
gested by Eq. 1. The significance of Eq. 3 is that the
tensor sFij is anisotropic in general, meaning that the
suction could produce not only a hydrostatic effect,
as suggested by Eq. 1, but also a shear effect, as
illustrated in Fig. 1. This finding is of significance
because shear is a major factor causing soil defor-
mation and failure. The suction-induced shear effect
facilitates understanding of many phenomena found
with unsaturated soils. Some essential, though still
preliminary, lab tests aimed at verifying the above
described theoretical finding have been carried out.
The tests show that suction can indeed produce a
significant macroscopic shear effect.
It can be proven that the quasi-effective stress as
defined in Eq. 3 is power conjugate to the strain rate
for the soil skeleton. As such, it makes modeling unsat-
urated soil behavior within the rigorous framework of
thermodynamics possible.
4 THEMODYNAMIC FORMULATION
By treating soil skeleton as a smeared single-phase
continuum, the rate of its specific internal energy is
given by the first law of thermodynamics as
where = the mass density; and ij
and ij = the effec-
tive stress and the strain, respectively; qi = the heat
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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
flux per unit area; and h = the specific heat supply. All
the quantities are referred to the smeared medium.
Based on the Clausius-Planck inequality (a stronger
form of the well-known Clausius-Duhem inequality
an expression of the second law of thermodynamics),
we have
where = absolute temperature; = the entropy pro-
duction rate; and = the rate of specific entropy. Com-
bining Eqs. 5 and 6 yields the following expression of
the rate of internal energy:
in which the last expression (after the second equality
sign) involves the common assumption that the dissi-
pation rate due to microstructural rearrangements is
expressed as = = fi i , where i = a set of internal
kinematic variables and fi = a set of thermodynamic
forces conjugate in power to i .
By Legendre transformation, we relate the
Helmholtz free energy to the internal energy as
and its rate as
For simplicity, here we consider only isothermal con-
ditions, i.e., = 0. Therefore,
where the terms after the second equality sign repre-
sent the rate of stored energy associated with the rates
of the macroscopic elastic and plastic strains eij and
p
ij , respectively, in which the additive decomposition
p
of strain ij = eij + ij is implied. Here ij is called the
back stress that characterizes internal interlocking. It is
important to note that unlike the common assumption
in kinematic hardening theories that ij is traceless, in
this research ij includes a hydrostatic part (Collins &
Kelly 2002).
From Eq. 10 we have
By invoking incremental linearity (rate independence,
which is approximately true for granular soils), we may
write
where L = a nonnegative loading index; nij = a trace- is accompanied by a p ii /3 < 0. Note further that
less normal pointing to the direction
of the devia- in Eq. 152 the dilatancy D is a function of p
, when
the confining pressure p
is low, D tends to be more
p
toric plastic strain rate e ij ; D = 3/2npq npq mii is the
dilatancy characterizing the ratio of the plastic volu- negative (more dilative), so that when the applied net
p p p
metric strain rate v = ii to the magnitude of e ij ; and confining pressure is low, it is possible for wetting to

produce a dilation instead of a compression.
ri is a state function of ij and i .
Substituting Eqs. 121,2 into Eq. 11 yields the fol-
lowing general form of yield function that adopts an
associative flow rule in the ij
ij space (but in gen- 5 HYDRAULIC HYSTERESIS
eral non-associative, as conventionally termed, in the
effective stress ij
space, as pointed out by Collins & As shown in Eqs. 3 and 4, there are two important
Kelly, 2002). entities for characterization of the roles of the pore
fluids in unsaturated soils. They are the suction s and
the degree of saturation Sr . These two quantities are
not independent and the relations between them are
The condition of consistency of the yield function can characterized by the so-called soil water characteris-
then be written as tic curve or SWCC. It is well known that SWCC is a
function of the history of hydraulic process, and wet-
ting and drying cycles introduce hysteresis loops in
SWCC. Such loops are associated with the energy dis-
sipation in the pore fluids and do not directly enter the
thermodynamic equations for the soil skeleton shown
in the previous section.
where the property of rate independence and Eulers Based on the existing continuum theories for mix-
theorem for homogeneous functions have been tures, the pore fluids in soil are treated as smeared
invoked. Therefore, the plastic deviatoric and volu- continua as well and they are superimposed to the
metric strain rates are given by solid phase. Accordingly, additional thermodynamic
equations may be derived for modeling the behavior
of the pore fluids, in which the energy equation asso-
ciated with the partial work in connection to the flow
of pore fluids under a constant pore air pressure leads
to the following condition of consistency:
In principle, the specific forms of the relations in the
above derivation can be determined by two appropri-
ately defined scalar functions the free energy func-
p
tion = (ij , ij ) and the dissipation rate function
where Kph is the hardening modulus for this hydraulic
ij , i , i ) = fi i 0 (Houlsby & Puzrin 2000)
= (
process, S r is the changing rate of the irrecoverable
p
with due considerations given to both macroscopic
part of Sr , and s is the back suction conjugate to S r in
p
observations and microstructural mechanisms as well
as to math consistency. terms of the rate of the locked internal energy. A simple
It is sufficient to note for the purpose of this paper phenomenological bounding surface model based on
that the back stress ij characterizes the stored energy Eq. 16 with a piecewise constant s has been proposed
due to interlocking. It is expected that during wet- by Li (2005). An example of the response of the model
ting a reduction in suction s may trigger a release of is shown in Fig. 2.
such locked energy, pushing ij towards a limit and
causing a permanent deformation. As ij approaches
the limit, say after several wetting/drying cycles, the 6 NUMERICAL EXAMPLES
locked energy becomes less sensitive to changes in
suction, so is the wetting induced deformation. Note A rudimentary model based on the above thermody-
also that a change in suction changes the effective namic framework and Camclay formulation has been
stress ij
as well (refer to Eq. 3), therefore the overall implemented. The model has successfully captured
effect of a change in suction, s , on soil deformation many interesting features of unsaturated soils during
depends on its overall role in ij
ij . For example, wetting/drying and consolidation, as well as during
a decrease of p
= ii
/3 by reducing applied pressure shearing. In the model, the back stress is tentatively
causes a negative (dilative) volumetric strain but a assumed to be isotropic, i.e.,
decrease of p
by a reduction of suction may result in
a positive (compressive) volumetric strain, because it

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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
 1
(a)
=4 2.1
0.8

Specific volume v
0.6
2.0
Sr

0.4
s=0
s=100 kPa
0.2 Starting point 1.9
Ending point s=300 kPa

0
3 10 30 100 300 1,000 3,000 10,000 25 50 100 200 400
s (kPa)
Mean net stress p:kPa
Figure 2. Model prediction of arbitrary wetting/drying
cycles. (b)
2.1

Specific volume v
-6
(a)
Volumetric Strain (%)

-4 C1 2.0
-2 C2
s=0
0 C4 s=100 kPa
v ua = 100 kPa 1.9 s=300 kPa
2 C5 d0 = 14 kN/m3
4 C3
25 50 100 200 400
6 Mean net stress p:kPa
0.001 0.01 0.1 1 10 100 1000
Suction s (MPa) Figure 4. (a) Isotropic consolidation test results on
Speswhite Kaolin (Sivakumar & Wheeler 2000): (b) Model
-6 simulation of the results.
(b)
Volumetric Strain (%)

-4
end when the residual back stress is approached. On
-2
the contrary, when the degree of saturation increases
0 (drying) the back stress moves away from its residual
value, implying an increase of the stored interlocked
2
energy. Because of the nonlinear nature of Eq. 18, dur-
4 ing wetting/drying cycles, the overall change of the
interlocked energy is negative, meaning in a hydraulic
6
process, an energy loss may occur in the solid phase
0.001 0.01 0.1 1 10 100 1000
as well. Note that this loss is in addition to those in
Suction s (MPa)
fluids, as implied by Eq. 16 and Fig. 2.
Figure 3. (a) Wetting/drying response of Boom clay (Alonso Alonso et al. (1995) reported their test results on
et al. 1995); (b) Model simulation. the wetting/drying response of Boom clay under a
wide range of the applied net stress. All the reported
tests have been simulated by the model, resulting in
and the law governing its evolution is given by quite accurate volumetric strains in response to the
wetting/drying cycles. The model simulations faith-
fully duplicated the impact of the applied net stress
as well. Limited to the page length, only the results of
where k is a scaling factor that controls the rate of one test reported by Alonso et al. and its counterpart of
the evolution and pres
is a residual value of p . It can model simulation are shown in Figs. 3a and b respec-
be seen from Eq. 18 that when the degree of satura- tively. It can be seen that the model indeed captures
tion increases (wetting), the back stress moves towards the main features of the test results.
its residual value pres
, implying a reduction of the Sivakumar & Wheeler (2000) reported the results
interlocked energy. This energy release process will of their consolidation tests on unsaturated Speswhite

513
Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
Kaolin. The tests were carried out under a gradually
increasing applied isotropic stress p while holding the
suction s constant. Some typical test results are shown
in Fig. 4a and their counterparts obtained by model
simulation are shown in Fig. 4b. Again one can see
that the model has captured the main features of the
test results.
7 CONCLUSIONS
It has been shown in this paper that constitutive mod-
els for unsaturated soils can be developed based on
the framework of thermodynamics. Two key issues to
be addressed in this approach are 1) the definition of
effective stress which must be conjugate to the strain
measure in terms of the work done onto the soil skele-
ton, and 2) the quantification of the evolution of the
interlocked energy in connection with the hydraulic
process.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The financial support by the Research Grants Council
of Hong Kong through grants HKUST6002/02E and
DAG03/04.EG33 is gratefully acknowledged.
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