Equations of state in soil compression based on statistical mechanics

Abstract

The authors have published a very interesting contribution in which they present a new and general relationship between void ratio and overburden pressure in the compression process of soils. The study is based on the law of interparticle energy distribution used in statistical mechanics and, in particular, the compression process of a soil is described according to its initial and final void ratios, and to a parameter /? which is related to the potential energy of a soil element. Such potential energy depends not only on the mass and elevation of soil particles, but also on the interactions between them. To account for such interactions, the authors introduce the concept of "imaginary particles", which allows them to use empirically-calibrated P values in the formulation without the need to consider interparticle interactions explicitly. In fact, the results presented by the authors show that such approach reproduces successfully the compression behaviour of a wide range of situations and soils.