Our faculty member, Prof. Mehmet Barış Can Ülker, was part of the research group that developed a hydro-mechanically coupled elasto-plastic model for unsaturated soils, incorporating hydraulic hysteresis effects. The study, published in the International Journal of Geotechnical Engineering, focuses on the isotropic compression behaviour of unsaturated soils and introduces a practical formulation requiring only three hydraulic parameters determined from a single unsaturated triaxial test.

The model establishes coupling relationships between water content, net stress, and void ratio changes, and employs an explicit integration scheme to simulate various stress and suction paths. Verification analyses showed that the proposed model effectively captures the coupled hydro-mechanical response of unsaturated soils, providing a reliable and efficient framework for advanced geotechnical analysis.

To read the full article: doi.org/10.1080/19386362.2025.2551945