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Changes in the chemistry of the pore fluid are known to have an impact on the hydro-mechanical behaviour of clays. Experimental evidence collected in recent decades has led to the formulation of constitutive chemo-mechanical models for expansive soils used in engineering practice for the containment of pollution, such as bentonite. Less attention has been paid to modelling the chemo-mechanical behaviour of non-expansive clays, which are less frequently used for geoenvironmental applications, but equally exposed to chemical changes. Key differences between the impact of salinity on the fabric of expansive and non-expansive clays are pointed out. At the macroscopic scale, an increase in salinity causes a translation of the normal compression line of non-expansive clays to higher void ratios, which in some cases is also accompanied by an increase in compressibility. The opposite occurs for expansive clays. Such experimental evidence provides the basis for a chemo-mechanical model formulated in the frame of elasto-plasticity with generalised hardening, whose yield surface expands with pore fluid concentration. The model is validated against experimental results, both original and from the literature. Simulation results compare very well with those of tests performed on reconstituted, compacted and intact samples.

Funding Information: The first author acknowledges the financial support provided by the Erasmus+ programme for her stay at Aalto University. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors The chemical composition of pore fluid and matric suction rule the mechanical behaviour of soils. In case of clays, their fabric changes in line with those variables. Since both the increase in matric suction and salinity cause a transition from an open to a close microstructure of low and medium activity clayey materials, a unique framework could tackle problems where salinity and saturation changes are expected. This paper presents a simple elasto-plastic model capable of reproducing the behaviour of unsaturated clayey soils in saline environments. Changes in the pore fluid composition are addressed through the use of osmotic suction as a variable. The proposed model extends the Barcelona Basic Model for partially saturated soils to consider the effect of osmotic suction. The model, implemented in the Thebes code, is calibrated for Boom Clay. The reproduced tests include mechanical loading at different matric and osmotic suctions in oedometric conditions, as well as more complex chemo-mechanical stress paths. Despite the simplicity of the formulation, the agreement between the experimental results and the simulations is encouraging. It seems that the modelling approach addresses the most important features of partially saturated soils with saline pore fluid which are slightly or moderately expansive.

Pore fluid composition strongly influences the mechanical behavior of clays, impacting both on their volumetric and shear response. Accounting for this aspect is crucial for engineering applications where changes of the chemical composition of the pore fluid are anticipated, such as transport through engineered barriers for the containment of pollutants, or slope stability of natural formations rich of clay minerals subjected to freshwater infiltration. In this work, a chemo-mechanical model capable of reproducing the response of medium to low activity clays under both mechanical and chemical loading paths is presented. The model is developed starting from the interpretation of experimental evidences in an elastic-plastic framework. Chemo-mechanical coupling is introduced both in terms of stress variables and hardening law. In particular, the formulation is specialized to variations of salt concentration, introducing osmotic suction as a chemical stress variable. The model was implemented in a constitutive driver for the integration at the REV level of the incremental constitutive equations, thus allowing for its validation against literature data.

Cutoff walls represent an interesting solution for the containment of the pollution of superficial groundwater. For polluted sites, the purpose of a cement-bentonite cutoff wall is to minimize contaminant transport and the primary design requirement for such materials is the low hydraulic conductivity. Despite these barriers are often cast in place as provisional tools, recently their wide use imparted the need for a better understanding of cement-bentonite walls also in the long-term. This certainly implies not only the need to study the time evolution of the cement-bentonite hydro-mechanical properties in a contaminated environment, but also the necessity of a continuous monitoring of the efficiency of the system. To this aim, the use of dedicated devices cast in place inside the wall when the mixture is still fluid proved to be particularly suitable to intercept and analyse the fluids flowing through the barrier. In this paper, the results of a numerical study are presented, with the goal of suggesting criteria about the optimum spacing and geometry of these devices.

Knowledge of the in situ stress state of rock mass is fundamental for engineering, geological and geophysical applications. In situ stress state determination requires in principle the evaluation of the three principal stresses and the related principal directions, but it is widely recognized in the literature that the maximum horizontal stress is the most difficult component to accurately estimate. In the context of borehole methods, this paper proposes a step-by-step analytical procedure to estimate some bounds to the maximum horizontal stress, starting from a geomechanical description of the rock and relying on information generally available in the engineering practice. The procedure is divided in substeps, each one requiring additional information about the mechanical properties of the rock and on the geometrical properties of the failed portion of rock: more information available implies a lower uncertainty on in situ stress estimate. Furthermore, since the proposed procedure is analytical, it allows a complete and very easy implementation in a spreadsheet. The aim of the work is thus to provide a rigourous but simple analytical tool that can be used in engineering practicte to estimate some bounds to the maximum horizontal in situ stress state. The approach is finally validated by means of both numerical simulations, performed with a sophisticated numerical tool, and experimental field data coming from the literature.

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.