Evaluation of Plasticity Models’ Ability to Analyze Typical Earth Dams’ Soil Materials

The selection of the constitutive laws reproducing the response of geomaterials usually becomes a very complicated procedure; especially during the analysis of geostructures containing coarse grained materials. The objective of this study, is the evaluation of models based on the perfect and hardening plasticity theory, regarding their ability to analyze the behaviour of soil materials, used for the construction of earth dams. The evaluated constitutive laws are the elastic–perfect plastic model based on the Mohr–Coulomb failure criterion and the isotropic hardening CAP model based on the same criterion. The data used for the evaluation of the models, originate from the body of the Sfikia earth dam. This dam is considered suitable, because of the specialized laboratory tests’ available data, regarding the materials of every zone. The availability of those data, as well as the variety of the construction geomaterials, allows the deduction of generalized conclusions, concerning the ability of the specific models to simulate a variety of similar earth constructions.