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A state parameter for sands

Article in Géotechnique · December 1985

DOI: 10.1680/geot.1985.35.2.99

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Mike Jefferies
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 State  Parameter  –  background  and  introduction  
         
The 1985 ‘state parameter’ paper (Been & Jefferies, 1985) came about after John Burland wrote
to Gulf Canada Resources about their work using hydraulically placed sands in the Arctic
offshore. The Crooks (2015) article for the Golder Foundation gives the background to all this,
with a copy of this article being provided as a supplementary resource to the state parameter
paper. Anyway, we were flattered, so a paper was duly written and sent to Geotechnique - where
it was promptly trashed by the reviewers… With hindsight, I wish that we had pushed-back at the
reviewers as the paper lost a bit of its underlying ideas between draft and published versions.
Anyway, some of these ideas resurfaced in the Jefferies & Been (1986) Reply to Discussion, with
that Reply being more coherent that the original paper (at least to my eyes).

Of course, the stumbling block was that the reviewers were locked into Cam-Clay thinking with its
single ICL. Echoes of this persist even today with some incorrectly treating ψ ó log(OCR).
However, the state parameter was driven by finding non-unique NCL when CPT sounding of
underwater hydraulic fills – which were as perfect an example as you will ever find of the
geological concept of normal consolidation. This initial testing was written up as Stewart et al
(1983) and a copy of that paper has been uploaded as supplementary material to the state
parameter paper.

Gulf also followed up with laboratory experiments to better understand non-unique NCL. This
appeared as Jefferies & Been (2000) Implications for critical state theory from isotropic
compression of sand, having taken twelve years and three separate attempts to get it through
Geotechnique reviewers – despite the clarity of the test results, people still wanted to hang on to
Cam-Clay think (and we wanted Geotechnique, as that is where critical state theory really gained
traction with contributions from many workers and we wanted to continue the thread). Do read
this isocompression paper, as really it should have been in print before the state parameter.

So far the testing and contributions described have been experiment, field testing, and plotting of
data within an appropriate framework. In the end, this will never be satisfactory and at some
point ‘you have to do the math’ (as the Americans like to say). That was the Jefferies (1993)
NorSand paper, which formally and properly generalizes the ideas of critical state soil mechanics.

Mike Jefferies
October 2016

References

Been, K and Jefferies, M.G. (1985); A state parameter for sand. Geotechnique,35, 99-112. And,
(…, 1986); Reply to Discussion, Geotechnique, 36, 127-132
Crooks, JHA (2015); The Challenge of the Beaufort Sea - Sand Clay and Ice. Golder Foundation.
Jefferies, M.G. (1993); NorSand: A simple critical state model for sand. Geotechnique 43, 91-103
Jefferies, M.G. & Been, K. (2000); Implications for critical state theory from isotropic compression
of sand. Geotechnique 50, 419-429.
Stewart, H.R., Jefferies, M.G., and Goldby, H.M. (1983); Berm construction for the Gulf mobile
Arctic caisson. Proc 15th Offshore Tech Conf, Houston. OTC 4552

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