The difficult task of teaching shear strength of soils

Abstract

Shear strength is a classical topic in Soil Mechanics and generally there is little concern about the inconsistencies behind the theories used to predict its value. In fact the debate on this issue is rather limited as the geotechnical community considers this a well-established concept. This note intends to highlight the difficulties that arise when teaching that concept in an undergraduate Soil Mechanics course. Those difficulties are related to the drained/ undrained behavior of soils, but also to the fact that cohesion is a tricky parameter, with a misleading physical meaning, depending not only on the properties of the contacts between particles, but also on external conditions (i.e., saturation or unsaturation). All these aspects are not analyzed in detail in many textbooks, but they should be considered in a modern Soil Mechanics course.