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Environmental variables such as temperature, matric suction and pore fluid composition are well known to influence the hydro-mechanical behavior of clays and shales. The type and the relevance of this influence depends on the mineralogical composition and on the fabric of the material. Soil activity is an engineering proxy for mineralogical composition which can be used for a preliminary characterization of the expected type of behaviour under chemical actions, if those do not imply very significant cation exchange or pH variations. Very large chemo-mechanical effects occur in highly active soils used in engineering works such as barriers for nuclear waste or landfills, however concentration changes also impact on the mechanical behavior of non – active soils and rocks, such as illitic or natural blends of clays. Such materials are widely distributed in nature and their mechanical response upon chemical changes can be problematic in many cases. Examples of engineering relevance include vast slope instabilities promoted by fabric changes due to desalinization in Scandinavian quick clays, and instability or convergence issues for boreholes drilled in shales exposed to muds with a different chemical composition from the one of the pore fluid. An elastoplastic model is formulated to simulate the volumetric behaviour of such materials along chemical and mechanical loads. In addition to the parameters of the Modified Cam Clay, it requires defining the dependency of the elasto-plastic compliance and reference void ratio on pore fluid salinity. The model performs well against experiments from literature where complex chemo-mechanical histories were imposed.

Environmental actions are known to induce relevant effects on the fabric of compacted active clays, which are successfully described by adopting a double porosity framework. In particular, the role of aggregate deformation has been recognized as fundamental to interpret the water retention behavior and the transport properties. These aspects are particularly relevant in the context of clay liners, being the material cast in place in unsaturated conditions and subjected to wetting process by pore fluids characterized by a chemical composition that is different from the one of compaction. Experimental data evidence that the water retention properties of active clays evolve as a function of pore water chemistry, since for a given matric suction the mass of stored water changes with water salinity. In this paper, a double porosity water retention model is proposed, capable of reproducing the variation of matric suction with water content accounting for the salinity of pore fluid. The role of salinity changes is accounted for by a suitable evolution law for aggregate deformation, which in turn affects the inter-aggregate porosity and thus the storage properties of the material.