A physically meaningful homogenization approach to determine equivalent elastic properties of layered soil

A simple, yet physically meaningful, homogenization approach to determine the “equivalent” elastic properties for a layered medium is proposed. The proposed approach makes use of the Reuss and Voigt approximations without employing auxiliary stresses and strains related to the different elastic properties of the material layers. When assuming that the constituent materials are isotropic, some special features of the equivalent homogeneous medium are discussed for special cases in which all layers have either the same Poisson’s ratio, elastic modulus or shear modulus. A methodology to determine the equivalent anisotropic elastic properties of multi-layered soils is proposed, in which all required quantities are physically meaningful and can be determined directly. The applicability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated through tests on two types of soils, one of which has a varved structure while the other is isotropic.