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Direct shear test is the simplest, inexpensive and the oldest among shear tests in soil laboratories.Although such test is commonly used in research and practice, analysis for many long geotechnical structures such as earth pressure and slope stability problems require measurement of plane strain soil properties.Plane strain soil properties are complex and need special skills and equipment to measure in the lab.Therefore, engineers usually rely on empirical relations to predict the plane strain soil properties from direct shear or triaxial test.In this study, a two-dimensional, plane strain finite difference model is employed in the software FLAC to simulate the mechanical behaviour of sandy soil tested in direct shear box.The study showed that the results of the finite element analysis complied with those obtained from laboratory tests conducted with the help of a direct shear box.The plane strain properties of the sandy soil can be back calculated from numerical simulations of direct shear tests with reasonable accuracy.Moreover, the numerical model was able to capture the trend in the experimental results and in most cases gave reasonable estimate of the shear strength and volume change of sandy soil.
El-Emam et al. (Mon,) studied this question.