SEDL / STP / STP156-EB / STP49604S

Macromeritic Liquids

Winterkorn, Hans F.
Princeton University, Princeton, N. J.

Pages: 13    Published: Jan 1954

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Abstract

In the theoretical study of the response of a soil system to dynamic loading, one usually makes the assumption that the soil system represents essentially a perfectly elastic, isotropic medium, introducing later adjustments and corrections to take care of the nonideal behavior of actual soils. However, as a good mathematician tests the general validity of a formula by applying it first to extreme conditions, in qualitative thinking, which should precede every quantitative formulation, it is justified and often very profitable to start with extreme concepts. For the case under consideration, one extreme concept is to consider a soil as a perfectly elastic, isotropic medium; the other extreme is to consider it as an actual or potential macromeritic liquid. The latter approach has been employed in this exploratory paper for the case of sand assemblies.