The Influence of Stress Path on the Stress-strain Behavior of Earthfills and its Application

For the purpose of exposing the influences of stress path on the stress-strain behaviors of earth fill, a lot of experiments were performed in the triaxial shear apparatus by using a variety of stress paths on various specimens of different soil types, involving cohesionless, also cohesive.According to the practical variation of stress distribution in the earth-rock dams, the laws of the stress-strain relationships under the condition of constant stress ratio （σ1/σ3=const.） stress path were emphatically discussed.An exponential model, which better reflects the results obtained from the experiments under the condition of constant stress-ratio path, was suggested.The application of this model to calculate the stress and displacement distributions in an earth dam during construction period comes to the conclusion that the stress path exerts an important influence on the displacement distribution in earth dam, rather than the stress distribution.In this paper, a comparative work was presented, taking stress path in consideration or leaving it out in the finite element method calculation of earth dams （i.e. comparison of exponential model with Duncan-Chang model）.