A three-dimensional soil–water coupled FE analysis of hollow cylinder test concerning non-uniform deformation

Abstract The hollow cylinder shear test is somewhat controversial due to its non-uniform stresses and strains, and has been analyzed by simple theoretical methods and two-dimensional FE calculations. In this paper, the hollow cylinder test under strain control was carried out numerically by treating the specimen as a three-dimensional initial-boundary value problem considering the inertial forces. At first, besides the known nonuniform strain, the non-uniformities of excess pore water pressure and overconsolidation ratio have been shown to benefit from a soil–water coupled analysis that employs the SYS Cam-clay model. Then, the influence of the specimen geometries, including wall thicknesses, heights and outer diameters on the non-uniformity was investigated sequentially. A new method for evaluating non-uniformity was proposed, which is suitable for the three-dimensional analysis. The response under a uniform deformation field, which is indicated by “the perfect path”, was presented to draw a comparison with the apparent behaviors, with non-uniformities taken into consideration. It should be noted that there is a critical height to prevent failure at the specimen ends according to the apparent behavior. Finally, the torque-controlled experiment indicated that 4 ribs could not transfer the torque reliably while 6 or 8 ribs were feasible.