A Mechanical Framework for Modelling Soil Compaction

Proctor's methodology is at the base of the classical approach of soil compaction, this approach, was conceived to reproduce field compaction in laboratory. Although Proctor tests are useful to study soil compaction, one of their main limitations is the impossibility of knowing the stress history and the hydraulic path (suction-water content) during compaction. This limitation becomes relevant when using constitutive models. Indeed, those models require the knowledge of the stress history to estimate the behavior of compacted soils. From a fundamental point of view, compaction can be analyzed as all geotechnical problems based on continuum mechanics analyzing: the boundary condition, the stress distribution within the layer subjected to compaction, and computing the increase in density due to compaction using constitutive models. This paper proposes a framework of soil compaction based on the theory of continuum mechanics and using theories for assessing the unsaturated soil behavior.