Critical State Soil Mechanics



Preface

This book is about the mechanical properties of saturated remoulded soil. It is written at the level of understanding of a final-year undergraduate student of civil engineering; it should also be of direct interest to post-graduate students and to practising civil engineers who are concerned with testing soil specimens or designing works that involve soil.

Our purpose is to focus attention on the critical state concept and demonstrate what we believe to be its importance in a proper understanding of the mechanical behaviour of soils. We have tried to achieve this by means of various simple mechanical models that represent (with varying degrees of accuracy) the laboratory behaviour of remoulded soils. We have not written a standard text on soil mechanics, and, as a consequence, we have purposely not considered partly saturated, structured, anisotropic, sensitive, or stabilized soil. We have not discussed dynamic, seismic, or damping properties of soils; we have deliberately omitted such topics as the prediction of settlement based on Boussinesq’s functions for elastic stress distributions as they are not directly relevant to our purpose.

The material presented in this book is largely drawn from the courses of lectures and associated laboratory classes that we offered to our final year civil engineering undergraduates and advanced students in 1965/6 and 1966/7. Their courses also included material covered by standard textbooks such as Soil Mechanics in Engineering Practice by K. Terzaghi and R. B. Peck (Wiley 1948), Fundamentals of Soil Mechanics by D. W. Taylor (Wiley 1948) or Principles of Soil Mechanics by R. F. Scott (Addison-Wesley 1963).


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