Disturbed State Model for Porous Saturated Materials

The widely used Terzaghi theory for deformation or consolidation in porous materials is based on the effective stress, a rather fictitious quantity, carried by the soil skeleton through the particle contact area, which is assumed to be negligible. This note presents a new generalized model based on the disturbed state concept, in which the average or weighted stress carried by the soil skeleton and fluid is defined on the basis of the change in contact area during deformation, that can be proportional to quantities such as the void ratio. A simple problem is solved in which the predictions from the proposed model and Terzaghi theory are compared. The proposed model has potential application as a general procedure for deformation in porous materials.