Long-term cyclic strain behavior of Wenzhou structural soft clay

Undrained monotonic and high-cycle loading (50000 cycles) triaxial teats are conducted on natural Wenzhou soft clay to study the influence of soil structure on the strength and cyclic strain behavior. The results show that when the confining pressure is low, the soil structure has little damage during consolidation, and the test samples exhibit higher normalized strength. With the increase of the confining pressure, the normalized strength decreases. When the confining pressure is higher than the yield pressure, the soil structure is completely damaged during consolidation, and then the normalized strength reaches a constant value, which is similar to that of remold samples. Because of this characteristic, the cyclic strain behavior of soft clay shows a clear difference with the confining pressure even keeping a constant value of mtml_13-0310_bak/img_1.png26.013.95= 0.45. The differences in stress-strain hysteresis loop, resilient behavior and permanent strain are discussed.