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research article

A three-scale cracking criterion for drying soils

Hueckel, Tomasz
•
Mielniczuk, Boleslaw
•
El Youssoufi, Moulay S.
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2014
Acta Geophysica

Cracking is a most unwanted development in soil structures undergoing periodic drying and wetting. Desiccation cracks arise in an apparent absence of external forces. Hence, either an internal, self-equilibrated stress pattern resulting from kinematic incompatibilities, or a stress resulting from reaction forces at the constraints appear as a cracking cause, when reaching tensile strength. At a meso-scale, tubular drying pores are considered in the vicinity of a random imperfection, inducing a stress concentration in the presence of significant pore suction. This approach allows one to use the effective stress analysis, which otherwise, away from the stress concentration, usually yields compressive effective stress and hence a physically incompatible criterion for a tensile crack. Recent experiments on idealized configurations of clusters of grains provide geometrical data suggesting that an imperfection as a result of air entry deep into the granular medium penetrates over 4 to 8 internal radii of a typical pore could yield a tensile effective stress sufficient for crack propagation.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.2478/s11600-014-0214-9
Web of Science ID

WOS:000340681100005

Author(s)
Hueckel, Tomasz
Mielniczuk, Boleslaw
El Youssoufi, Moulay S.
Hu, Liang B.
Laloui, Lyesse  
Date Issued

2014

Publisher

De Gruyter Open Ltd

Published in
Acta Geophysica
Volume

62

Issue

5

Start page

1049

End page

1059

Subjects

drying

•

cracking

•

air entry

•

stress concentration

•

suction

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LMS  
Available on Infoscience
October 23, 2014
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/107631
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