Publisher's Synopsis
This book describes the developments leading to the Original Cam Clay model, focusing on fundamentals of the shearing of soil. The aim is to lay the groundwork of understanding that should form the basis of geotechnical design, guiding engineers towards the class of behaviour to be expected under different combinations of effective stress and water content. In this book, there are a few equations, but simple ones; much greater challenge rests in the arguments put forward regarding soil behaviour and the intellectual effort needed to keep pace with the author. The book is divided into six chapters, which progress from the simple planar sliding of soil towards plastic design in geotechnical engineering. A modest ambition for the book might be to see the words 'cohesion' and 'adhesion' excised from our soil mechanics vocabulary, replacing them with, respectively, 'shear strength' at a given water content and effective stress level and on the rather rare occasions where it is appropriate, 'cementation'.;Once armed with the simple concept of wet and dry of the critical state line, readers will fully understand whether a sample will wish to contract or dilate, whether pore pressures generated during undrained shearing will tend to the positive or negative, and conditions where ductile plastic deformation might change to brittleness and fracture. The ability of the model to quantify these states is immediately appealing to modern readers, rather than having to digest purely qualitative explanations. Full of technical and personal insights, this is a rewarding book that reinforces ideas described in some of the authors' earlier works. For the unconverted, it is an invitation to re-examine your basic understanding of soil behaviour. For the converted, it is a call to ensure that our teaching and the vocabulary and nomenclature we use in describing strength models for soil, reflect accurately the underlying concepts.
