The Behavior of Clay Soil under the Effect of Cyclic Loading

Abstract

The behavior of soil appropriate to earthquake and maritime problems may studied by
performing alternating cyclic simple shear and triaxial tests. The main purpose of this
present research is to evaluate the strength reduction of saturated untrained clay soils under
direct shear cyclic stress. The test results revealed that such reduction exists and it increased
with increasing cyclic stress amplitude, confining pressure, the number of loading cycles and
with decreasing sample thickness. The results indicate that there is a lower limit to the cyclic
stress ratio below which cyclic loading has a negligible effect on clay softening. It is
observed also that the direct cyclic strength is greater than the triaxial cyclic strength which
conforms to the published results.