Mechanical properties and an empirical model of compacted silty clay subjected to freeze-thaw cycles

This paper is concerned with the mechanical properties of compacted silty clay subjected to freeze-thaw in cold regions. A series of unconsolidated-undrained triaxial compression experiments were conducted on compacted Harbin silty clay to investigate the effect of confining pressure, number of freeze-thaw cycle, initial compaction degree, and initial water content on the stress-strain relationship, failure strength and tangent modulus. The results show that the normalized failure strength and tangent modulus are stable after three freeze-thaw cycles, and increase with the increase in initial compaction degree and reduction in the initial water content. Finally, the modified parameters and six functions were proposed to consider effects of influence factors and were implemented into the empirical model of failure strength and tangent modulus. The validations show the calculated data get well agreement with experimental data.