Constitutive Model for Sensitive Clays under Nonisothermal Conditions

Journal article, 2026

The response of natural sensitive clays is affected by moderate temperature changes. This has consequences for the testing of natural samples in the laboratory and energy foundations in the field, as well as construction problems that involve temperature variations. A temperature-sensitive version of the isothermal Creep-SClay1S model is proposed in this paper. The new constitutive model incorporates the thermal effect on the apparent preconsolidation pressure based on an extensive experimental data set comprising incremental loading one-dimensional (1D) compression tests on remolded and intact samples of a natural sensitive clay. Compared with the isothermal version of the model, the improvements of the new model are most pronounced for sensitive clays in their natural undisturbed state at an effective stress level close to the apparent preconsolidation pressure. This often coincides with the range of the operational effective stresses in geotechnical engineering. The effective stress-based formulation of the model enables its implementation into any multiphysics framework, hence facilitating other important thermal mechanisms, such as, e.g., thermal consolidation.