Inspection of Miner’s Rule on Coarse and Fine-Grained Soils Under One-Dimensional Conditions: Experimental Evidence and Numerical Modelling

Abstract Conventional engineering practice addresses irregular cyclic loading by bundling it into packages of cycles with constant amplitudes. This assumption is suitable only if the soils obey the Miner’s rule, which states that the order of the load cycles does not significantly impact the final strain accumulation. The validity of this hypothesis has already been widely examined for triaxial conditions, but this has not yet been explored for oedometric ones. Accordingly, this research combines oedometric stress-controlled tests with numerical inspection (based on hypoplastic models) to determine whether two tested soils follow Miner’s rule. The adopted soil samples are two typical testing materials, namely Malaysian Kaolin (fine-grained soil) and Zbraslav Sand (coarse-grained soil). The findings from this investigation showed that both studied materials follow Miner’s rule under oedometric conditions, at least in the range of applied loads.