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Desiccation cracking in clayey soils occurs when they lose moisture, leadingto an increase in their compressibility and hydraulic conductivity and hencesignificant reduction of soil strength. The prediction of desiccation crackingin soils is challenging due to the lack of insights into the complex coupledhydro-mechanical process at the grain scale. In this paper, a new hybriddiscrete-continuum numerical framework, capable of capturing hydro-mechanicalbehaviour of soil at both grain and macro scales, is proposed for predictingdesiccation cracking in clayey soil. In this framework, a soil layer isrepresented by an assembly of DEM particles, each occupies an equivalentcontinuum space and carries physical properties governing unsaturated flow.These particles move freely in the computational space following the discreteelement method (DEM), while their contact network and the continuum mixturetheory are used to model the unsaturated flow. The dependence ofparticle-to-particle contact behaviour on water content is represented by acohesive-frictional contact model, whose material properties are governed bythe water content. In parallel with the theoretical development is a series ofexperiments on 3D soil desiccation cracking to determine essential propertiesand provide data for the validation of mechanical and physical behaviour. Verygood agreement in both physical behaviour (e.g. evolution of water content) andmechanical behaviour (e.g. occurrence and development of cracks, anddistribution of compressive and tensile strains) demonstrates that the proposedframework is capable of capturing the hydro-mechanical behaviour of soil duringdesiccation. The capability of the proposed framework facilitates numericalexperiments for insights into the hydro-mechanical behaviour of unsaturatedsoils that have not been possible before.

A hybrid discrete-continuum approach to model hydro-mechanical behaviour of soil during desiccation