Abstract
This paper presents a soil/water coupled formulation for unsaturated soil mass as an initial-boundary value problem, in which the constitutive equation for unsaturated soils proposed by Karube et al. is employed. This model is characterized in terms of bulk stress and meniscus stress. And also the water retention curve plays an important role to specify their inner stress components in the theoretical formulation of constitutive modeling. A soil/water finite element code is examined throughout comparison with some analytical solutions. Finally, in this paper, the F. E. code is applied to an initial-boundary value problem and the stress/deformation developing inside the domain is examined. The importance of considering mechanical characteristics of unsaturated soils is emphasized in the case of analysis of soil structures such as the core of rock fill dam.
