Numerical simulation of agricultural soil shear stress test

In this work a numerical simulation of agricultural soil shear stress tests has been performed through soil shear strength data detected by a soil shearometer. As a matter of fact, we used a soil shearometer available on the market to measure soil shear stress and realized special equipment allowing soil shear stress’ automated detection. It was connected to an acquisition data system displaying and recording soil shear stress during the full field tests. A soil shearometer unit was used to the in situ measurements of soil shear stress in full field conditions, for different types of soils located on Sele river’s right side, at a distance of about 1 km from one another along the perpendicular to the Sele river direction towards the sea. Shearometer unit’s full field tests had been performed alongside with considered soil characteristic parameters data collection. Such parameters’ values derived from hydrostatic compression and triaxial tests performed on considered soil samples and repeated 4 times, and we noticed that the difference between the maximum and minimum values detected for every set of performed tests, had never been over 4%. Full field shear tests had been simulated by Abaqus program code considering three different material models of soils, usually utilised in literature and precisely: Mohr-Coulomb, Drucker-Prager and Cam-Clay models. Actually, we compared then all data outcomes obtained by numerical simulations with those resulting from the experimental tests. Besides, we discussed any further simulations’ data results obtained with different material models, and selected, in this way, the best material model for each considered soil to be used in tyre/soil contact simulation or in soil compaction study