Abstract：The elementary mechanical behaviors, constitutive modeling and failure
criterion of soils from an important theoretical basis for the discipline of soil
mechanics and geotechnical engineering. This paper focuses on the mechanical
behaviors of saturated clay, sand and rockfill materials (coarse granular
aggregates) and a review for the recent development of constitutive modeling and
failure criterion of these three types of the soils is presented. Some typical
mechanical behaviors of saturated clay including compression behavior, shear
behavior—critical state and dilatancy, behaviour of natural clay with loss of
structure, influence of second principal stress, induced anisotropy and effect of
principal stress rotation, undrained shear strength, time-dependency, and
micromechanics-based analytical modeling are introduced first. Then, several
important issues regarding the mechanical properties of sand are discussed, which
involve the critical state framework and state-dependent dilatancy, anisotripic
sand behaviour, strain localization and shear bending. Finally the researches on
the influences of particle crushing on the mechanical behavior of rockfill
materials (coarse granular aggregates) are particularly concerned. Attention is
given to descriptive methods for particle crushing, the impact of breakage on the
dilatancy, critical state line and stress-strain relationship, and macro-micro
mechanical modeling.
