Influence of Loading History and Boundary Conditions on Parameters of Soil Constitutive Models

Parameters of soil constitutive models are not constant. This mainly concerns the strain parameters such as K, G or E_oed modules. What influences their values is not only soil type, structure and consistency, but also the history of stress and strain states. So, it is the question of the current state but also of what happened to the subsoil in the past (regarding geological and anthropological activity) and what impact would have the planned soil–structure interaction.

This paper presents an overview of the literature showing how much the soil constitutive model parameters depend on loading and boundary conditions of a particular geotechnical problem. Model calibration methods are shortly described with special attention paid to the author’s “Loading Path Method”, which allows estimation of optimum parameter values of any soil constitutive model. An example of the use of this method to estimate strain parameters E and ν of Coulomb–Mohr elasticperfectly plastic model is given.