Effect of partial saturation on strain localisation in over-consolidated fine-grained soils

The paper deals with numerical modelling of strain localisation in highly over-consolidated silty soils under fully and partially saturated conditions. A series of drained and (globally) undrained biaxial tests were performed to analyse how saturation affects the overall soil response and shear band geometry. The hydromechanical soil behaviour was described using the WR2-Unsat model in combination with the van Genuchten water retention curve. In order to regularise the solution and to model the shear zone rigorously, the model formulation was modified by introducing a non-local method whose ability to reduce the influence of the adopted discriminant scheme was preliminarily verified.