Resilient and plastic strain behavior of freezing–thawing mucky clay under subway loading in Shanghai

Depending on artificial freezing method applied in subway tunnel construction, a series of stress-controlled cyclic triaxial tests were conducted on freezing–thawing mucky clay to investigate their resilient and plastic strain behavior. In terms of practical engineering, this study focuses on three significant influencing factors which are artificial freezing temperatures, dynamic stress amplitude and loading frequency. This study demonstrates how these influence factors effect on the resilient strain or dynamic elastic modulus and accumulated plastic strain which are crucial to better understanding the strain behavior of freezing–thawing soil. The results indicate that the value of freezing temperature has slight influence on dynamic elastic modulus, but the freeze–thaw action can truly decrease the dynamic elastic modulus of soil, and soil with higher freezing temperature possesses larger accumulated axial strain. Besides, the dynamic elastic modulus decreases remarkably with the increasing of the cyclic stress amplitude, while the accumulated plastic strain behaves adversely. In addition, loading frequency has the least effect compared with other two factors, but lower frequency can generate larger accumulated plastic strain. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014