Modeling consolidation of soft clay by developing a fractional differential constitutive model in conjunction with an intelligent displacement inversion method.

Journal: PloS one
PMID:

Abstract

Studying the constitutive relation of soft clays is of critical importance for fundamentally understanding their complex consolidation behavior. This study proposes a fractional differential constitutive model in conjunction with an intelligent displacement inversion method based on the classic particle swarm optimization for modeling the deformation behavior of soft clay. The model considered the rheological properties of soft clay at different consolidation stages. In addition, statistical adaptive dynamic particle swarm optimization-least squares support vector machines were implemented to identify the model parameters efficiently. The accuracy and effectiveness of the model were validated using available experimental results. Finally, the application results showed that the proposed model could efficiently simulate coupling properties of soft clay's primary and secondary consolidations.

Authors

  • Zhen Liu
    School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, PR China; Analytical Service Unit, WuXi AppTec (Shanghai) Co., Ltd, Shanghai, 200131, PR China.
  • Wei Hu
    State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
  • Weihua Ming
    Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
  • Shenghua Xiong
    Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
  • Cuiying Zhou
    Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
  • Lihai Zhang
    Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.