Hardening & softening soil models

In recent years, soil models have significantly advanced from the basic elastic perfectly plastic
Mohr Coulomb soil models. The Mohr-Coulomb soil model was limited in that the stress-
dependency of soil stiffness was not taken into account in addition to the yield cap being
fixed in principal state.

Mohr-Coulomb merupakan model tanah dengan asumsi material tanah bersifat elastic perfectly
plastic. Model MC memiliki Batasan sebagai berikut:

1. Kekakuan tanah yang tergantung besarnya tegangan tidak diperhitungkan

2. yield cap diberikan sebagai nilai yang tetap pada principal state

Now we have soil models that can model soil stiffness degradation with stress in addition to
having a yield surface that expands or contracts due to plastic straining.

For strain-hardening soil models (such as the Hardening Soil model in PLAXIS), the yield
surface expands to accommodate plastic straining while strain-softening soil models will
have a contraction of the yield surface.

Seiring perkembangan ilmu pengetahuan dan teknologi, berkembang model tanah yang dapat
menggambarkan perilaku degradasi kekakuan tanah akibat tegangan dan memiliki yield
surface yang mengembang atau menyusut akibat regangan plastis.

At typical working loads, whether a user has adopted a strain-hardening or strain-softening

soil model is often irrelevant since the soil has not reached the yield surface. For cases such
as cavity expansion, however, the choice of the soil model has a significant impact on the
resulting stresses and displacements since soil failure will have occurred. For clayey soils, a
strain-hardening soil model will show a permanent increase in mean effective stress in the
soil adjacent to the expanded cylindrical (or spherical) cavity. A strain-softening soil model,
however, will show an increase in mean effective stress up to soil yielding and then exhibit a
reduction in mean effective stress. After cavity expansion, a strain softening soil model can
show a reduction or an increase in mean effective stress in the soil adjacent to the cavity.

Pada beban kerja yang tipikal, model strain-hardening atau strain-softening tidak memiliki
pengaruh yang signifikan, karena kondisi yield surface tanah belum terlampaui. Namun, pada
kasus tertentu, seperti pada permasalahan cavity expansion, pemilihan jenis pemodelan akan
mempengaruhi tegangan dan displacement yang terjadi pada tanah, karena tanah telah
mengalami kegagalan.

The most advanced soil models at present (e.g. the SCLAY-1S soil model) have improved on
this further by taking into account the destructuration of clays due to large strains. These
models consider the breakdown of inter-particle bonds due to large strains and the
destructuration of the clay structure.