Compaction bands and oedometric testing in cemented soils

This paper presents a summary of recent work on cemented soils at Milan University of Technology (Politecnico). Oedometric and triaxial tests have been performed on lightly bonded soils of medium to very high porosity. Soils tested vary from a rather conventional silica sand-lime mixture to more unusual materials, including expanded clay aggregates, fragmented marine shells or stabilized metallurgical residues. A simple but powerful elasto-plastic bonded soil model is employed to select testing procedures and interpret the results obtained. Both experimental results and model simulations are employed here to illustrate and explore the onset of compaction bands, a new form of localization previously observed in rocks but whose appearance is here first signaled for bonded soils.