Cyclic response of Gulf of Mexico clay from the Walker Ridge
type: CreativeWork
description: A significant number of offshore, nearshore and onshore structures are founded on soft clays. Both the structure and the foundation soft clay generally must withstand a combination of non-standard cyclic environmental loads, gravity loads and seismic loads. The importance of these structures, be it from a safety, economic or environmental point of view, warrants an understanding of how their foundations and the foundation soils behave under cyclic loads. When a fine-grained soil (e.g., a soft clay) is subjected to cyclic loading under undrained conditions, its structure gets progressively destroyed. The consequences of this are a progressive decrease in the cyclic shearing resistance, a build-up of cyclic-shear induced excess porewater pressure, and a decrease in the shear modulus. These three effects collectively are known as undrained cyclic degradation. For offshore soft clays, undrained cyclic degradation poses a significant hazard to infrastructure such as oil platforms, towers, pipelines, cables, and subsea or floating systems. This research used laboratory and in-situ tests on Gulf of Mexico (GOM) clay from the Walker Ridge to draw insights on the cyclic response of soft clays in general. The main objectives of this research were to (1) characterize GOM clay in terms of its index properties, compressibility and monotonic shear behavior, and compare it to other soft clays studied in the literature, (2) propose a simple semi-empirical predictive relationship for its small-strain shear modulus, and extend it to soft clays in general, (3) propose a new framework to quantify the cyclic shear behavior of GOM clay and other soft clays in terms of the cyclic shearing resistance, shear modulus and excess cyclic shear-induced porewater pressure, (4) investigate how the cyclic response of reconstituted GOM clay differs from the intact clay and, (5) investigate its post-cyclic drained and post-cyclic undrained behavior of GOM clay. The main findings of this research are …
abstract: A significant number of offshore, nearshore and onshore structures are founded on soft clays. Both the structure and the foundation soft clay generally must withstand a combination of non-standard cyclic environmental loads, gravity loads and seismic loads. The importance of these structures, be it from a safety, economic or environmental point of view, warrants an understanding of how their foundations and the foundation soils behave under cyclic loads. When a fine-grained soil (e.g., a soft clay) is subjected to cyclic loading under undrained conditions, its structure gets progressively destroyed. The consequences of this are a progressive decrease in the cyclic shearing resistance, a build-up of cyclic-shear induced excess porewater pressure, and a decrease in the shear modulus. These three effects collectively are known as undrained cyclic degradation. For offshore soft clays, undrained cyclic degradation poses a significant hazard to infrastructure such as oil platforms, towers, pipelines, cables, and subsea or floating systems. This research used laboratory and in-situ tests on Gulf of Mexico (GOM) clay from the Walker Ridge to draw insights on the cyclic response of soft clays in general. The main objectives of this research were to (1) characterize GOM clay in terms of its index properties, compressibility and monotonic shear behavior, and compare it to other soft clays studied in the literature, (2) propose a simple semi-empirical predictive relationship for its small-strain shear modulus, and extend it to soft clays in general, (3) propose a new framework to quantify the cyclic shear behavior of GOM clay and other soft clays in terms of the cyclic shearing resistance, shear modulus and excess cyclic shear-induced porewater pressure, (4) investigate how the cyclic response of reconstituted GOM clay differs from the intact clay and, (5) investigate its post-cyclic drained and post-cyclic undrained behavior of GOM clay. The main findings of this research are …
author: Taukoor, Vashish
language: en
keywords: cyclic response of clays, cyclic triaxial testing, cyclic degradation of clays, Gulf of Mexico clay, reconstituted clay cyclic behavior, post-cyclic behavior of clays, bender element testing of clays, small-strain shear modulus of clays
date published: 2020-03-02T22:10:22Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:45Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106314