Assessment of 3D strength criteria of sand in the presence of strain localization

¹ School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, 175005 Mandi, India
² School of Architecture and Civil Engineering, The University of Adelaide, 5005 Adelaide, Australia

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Published online: 1 December 2025

Abstract

There exist various 3D strength criteria for sand that have been reported to accurately predict its strength response under homogeneous deformation conditions. However, the efficacy of these failure criteria in predicting strength under non-homogeneous deformation conditions, like in the presence of strain localization, has not been explored in detail. In the present study, a series of DEM based true triaxial simulations have been performed to investigate the influence of strain localization on the strength prediction by four commonly adopted 3D strength criteria for sand, i.e. Lade (1977), Ogawa (1974), Matsuoka-Nakai (1978) and Satake (1975) model. From the true triaxial simulations, it has been observed that strain localization in the form of a shear band develops within all the specimens when sheared under b > 0 condition, where b is the intermediate principal stress ratio. Among the adopted strength criteria, the Lade criterion estimates comparable peak stresses with reference to the DEM results. However, due to the formation of persistent shear bands, all four models significantly overpredict the strength response at the critical state. Additionally, at the critical state, the stresses within the shear band region have been noticed to converge at a local b value between 0.2 – 0.4 and become independent of the applied global b value.