Shear Strength (soil) - Undrained Strength

Undrained Strength

This term describes a type of shear strength in soil mechanics as distinct from drained strength.

Conceptually, there is no such thing as the undrained strength of a soil. It depends on a number of factors, the main ones being:

• Orientation of stresses
• Stress path
• Rate of shearing
• Volume of material (like for fissured clays or rock mass)

Undrained strength is typically defined by Tresca theory, based on Mohr's circle as:

σ₁ - σ₃ = 2 S_u

Where:

σ₁ is the major principal stress

σ₃ is the minor principal stress

is the shear strength (σ₁ - σ₃)/2

hence, = S_u (or sometimes c_u), the undrained strength.

It is commonly adopted in limit equilibrium analyses where the rate of loading is very much greater than the rate at which pore water pressures, that are generated due to the action of shearing the soil, may dissipate. An example of this is rapid loading of sands during an earthquake, or the failure of a clay slope during heavy rain, and applies to most failures that occur during construction.

As an implication of undrained condition, no elastic volumetric strains occur, and thus Poisson's ratio is assumed to remain 0.5 throughout shearing. The Tresca soil model also assumes no plastic volumetric strains occur. This is of significance in more advanced analyses such as in finite element analysis. In these advanced analysis methods, soil models other than Tresca may be used to model the undrained condition including Mohr-Coulomb and critical state soil models such as the modified Cam-clay model, provided Poisson's ratio is maintained at 0.5.

One relationship used extensively by practicing engineers is the empirical observation that the ratio of the undrained shear strength c to the original consolidation stress p' is approximately a constant for a given Over Consolidation Ratio (OCR). This relationship was first formalized by (Henkel 1960) and (Henkel & Wade 1966) who also extended it to show that stress-strain characteristics of remolded clays could also be normalized with respect to the original consolidation stress. The constant c/p relationship can also be derived from theory for both critical-state and steady-state soil mechanics (Joseph 2012). This fundamental, normalization property of the stress-strain curves is found in many clays, and was refined into the empirical SHANSEP (stress history and normalized soil engineering properties) method.(Ladd & Foott 1974).