INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR SOIL MECHANICS AND GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING This paper was downloaded from the Online Library of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE). The library is available here: https://www.issmge.org/publications/online-library This is an open-access database that archives thousands of papers published under the Auspices of the ISSMGE and maintained by the Innovation and Development Committee of ISSMGE. Modelling and testing Modélisation et expérimentation David Muir Wood School of Science, Engineering, University of Dundee, United Kingdom,
[email protected] ABSTRACT: All soil testing is performed in the context of an implicitly or explicitly assumed (constitutive) model for the soil. The interface between modelling and testing is challenged by deficiencies of the testing and by deficiencies of the model. Many testing configurations lead to inadvertent or inevitable inhomogeneity, so that a soil samples behaves as a system and not a single element. But models are appropriate simplifications of reality and are inevitably deficient. The more severe the deficiency the harder it becomes to calibrate the model against experimental data. Even for more elaborate models, the conjectures on which they are based are rarely subjected to testing regimes which deliberately set out to refute those conjectures. No matter how extensive our testing of a model against laboratory data, a subsequent application will certainly take it into an unknown region in which it is to be hoped that no unintended instabilities will appear. RÉSUMÉ : Tous les essais de mécanique de sols sont effectués dans un contexte d’existence d'un modèle du sol implicitement ou explicitement supposé.