A finite strain thermal elastic visco-plastic consolidation model enhanced by particle swarm optimization of model parameters

Abstract

In this paper, a radial finite strain thermal consolidation model is extended to further consider the viscous behavior of soft soils. A newly developed thermal elastic visco-plastic (TEVP) constitutive model for the temperature and time-dependent stress–strain behavior of soft soils is implemented in a radial finite strain thermal consolidation model, which is solved through a numerical solver. This solving method is verified by comparing the calculated results by the numerical solver with two existing studies. After this, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to enhance the prediction performance of the proposed consolidation model by automatically calibrating the model parameters during the consolidation process. Two physical model tests were conducted to examine the validity of the proposed model and PSO-assisted method. The results indicate that the proposed radial consolidation model captures the viscous characteristics (including creep) of the time-dependent settlements of soft soils, which could not be simulated by the former reported models. The PSO-assisted method has demonstrated practical applicability when compared with physical model tests. The longer the observation time, the better the predictive performance of our radial finite strain thermal consolidation model. It is recommended that the observation time should not be shorter than the time required for primary consolidation.