An alternative process-based approach to predicting the response of water-saturated porous media to harmonic hydrodynamic loads

Abstract

Methods have been developed to predict how hydrodynamic loads acting on nearly saturated porous media are transmitted to the subsoil. In line with the effective stress principle of Terzaghi, these methods apply the boundary conditions that the effective stresses at the surface of a porous medium are zero, and that the pore water pressures carry the full load. Here, a new approach is presented which is based on defining a stress and a stress gradient as boundary conditions. The stress gradient follows from the momentum balance equation, thereby assuring that the solution abides by d'Alembert's principle of minimization of virtual work. The corresponding solution is in full accordance with the volume and momentum balance equations of the linear elastic soil matrix and the volume and momentum balance equations of the pore water across the computational domain. The new method is thereby able to correctly reproduce measurements of pore pressure changes due to hydrodynamic loads under the assumption of a porous medium consisting of incompressible particles and pore water which could either be compressible or incompressible. The advantage of the proposed method is that it requires one less boundary condition at the surface of the porous medium. The method is therefore able to predict the magnitude of the effective stresses on a soil surface. Due to the ability to retain the assumption of incompressible water, the method has also become independent on a calibration parameter. The results of the method induce questions with respect to the validity of Terzaghi's principle of effective stress at the boundary when porous media are subjected to hydrodynamic loads.