The shear strength of a soil is essentially required to predict the stabilities of slopes, excavations and embankments etc. Generally the shear strength of saturated soils has been predicted by the Mohr-Coulomb theory. However, field data accumulated in the past have evidently shown that saturated conditions are actually never reached in arid and semi-arid regions. An analytical model is developed to predict shear strength of an unsaturated soil with respect with matric suction. The formulation takes into account the influence of the mean stress on soil water retention curves. The results of the model developed for predicting the shear strength are compared with available experimental results. The good agreement between the estimates and the experimental data indicates that the proposed equation is promising and reliable for estimating preliminary unsaturated shear strength parameters.
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