The Hardening Soil Small (HSS) is a constitutive model being extension to the well established Hardening Soil Model (HS) accounting for the nonlinearity of small strain stiffness. It is implemented in commercial finite element computer codes for geotechnical analyses and used widely in research and design. The article deals with a problem known as overshooting after very small load reversals. It induces much higher stiffness than...

The popularity of the elasto-plastic Hardening Soil (HS) model is based on simple parameter identification from standard testing and empirical formulas. The HS model is implemented in many commercial FE codes designed to analyse geotechnical problems. In its basic version, the stress–strain behaviour within the elastic range is subject to the hypoelastic power law, which assures the barotropy of the elastic stiffness. However,...

Time-dependence of soft soils has already been thoroughly investigated. The knowledge on creep and relaxation phenomena is generally available in the literature. However, it is still rarely applied in practice. Regarding the organic soils, geotechnical engineers mostly base their calculations on the simple assumptions. Yet, as presented within this paper, the rate-dependent behaviour of soft soils is a very special and important...