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Mechanical and permeability characteristics of Q2 soft-plastic loess under coupled hydro-mechanical conditions

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Abstract

For the soft-plastic loess tunnel engineering, collapse and damage of the surrounding rock during excavation are often driven by the combined action of the seepage water and the unloading effect. Under water pressure and unloading, the soil suffers complex stress-seepage coupling action causing the inevitable change of permeability and mechanical properties. In this paper, seepage control devices were added to the GDS test device, and a new triaxial permeability measurement system was developed. Triaxial unloading–seepage tests were conducted on soft-plastic loess under the effect of hydraulic coupling. The variation of permeability characteristics of Q2 type soft-plastic loess under lateral unloading and the soil mechanical characteristics under different seepage pressure were analyzed. Meanwhile, microstructure characteristics of soft-plastic loess during the triaxial test were obtained by scanning electron microscope to clarify the deformation and seepage mechanism. The results show that the strength of soft-plastic loess decreases significantly with the increase of osmotic pressure. Under the condition of 50 and 100 kPa osmotic pressure, the cohesive force of soft-plastic loess decreases by 15.5% and 39.0% and the friction angle decreases by 9.4% and 22.6%, respectively. The permeability coefficient of loess increases slowly at first and then increases rapidly during the unloading process. The main reason for the significant increase of permeability coefficient is the penetration of soil fissures and the formation of shear bands after entering the plastic deformation stage.

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Data availability

All data, models and codes included in this paper are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52308386, 52278391, 51978064), National Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (Grant Nos. 2023AH050186) and scientific research project of introducing talents—Anhui Jianzhu University (Grant Nos. 2022QDZ24).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Civil Engineering, Anhui Jianzhu University, Hefei, 230601, China

    Qiuyang Hong

  2. School of Highway, Chang’an University, Xi’an, 710064, China

    Qiuyang Hong & Hongpeng Lai

  3. School of Civil Engineering, Chang’an University, Xi’an, 710064, China

    Yuyang Liu

  4. National-Local Joint Engineering Laboratory of Building Health Monitoring and Disaster Prevention Technology, Anhui Jianzhu University, Hefei, 230601, China

    Qiuyang Hong

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  1. Qiuyang Hong
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Contributions

Qiuyang Hong: conceptualization, data curation, methodology. Hongpeng Lai: funding acquisition, supervision, validation. Yuyang Liu: data curation, conceptualization. All the authors have read and approved this paper, and due care has been taken to ensure the integrity of the work. Neither the entire paper nor any part of its content has been published or has been accepted elsewhere, and it is not being submitted to any other journal.

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Correspondence to Hongpeng Lai.

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No conflict of interest exits in the submission of this manuscript, and manuscript is approved by all the authors for publication. The author would like to declare on behalf of his co-authors that the work described is a original research that has not been published previously, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere, in whole or in part. All the authors listed have approved the manuscript.

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Hong, Q., Lai, H. & Liu, Y. Mechanical and permeability characteristics of Q2 soft-plastic loess under coupled hydro-mechanical conditions. Environ Earth Sci 83, 75 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-023-11366-4

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