Wave-induced stresses and pore pressures near a mudline

Conventional methods for the determination of water-wave induced stresses in seabeds composed of granular soils are based on Biot-type models, in which the soil skeleton is treated as an elastic medium. Such methods predict effective stresses in the soil that are unacceptable from the physical point of view, as they permit tensile stresses to occur near the upper surface of the seabed. Therefore, in this paper the granular soil is assumed to behave as an elastic-ideally plastic material, with the Coulomb-Mohr yield criterion adopted to bound admissible stress states in the seabed. The governing equations are solved numerically by a finite difference method. The results of simulations, carried out for the case of time-harmonic water waves, illustrate the depth distributions of the excess pore pressures and the effective stresses in the seabed, and show the shapes of zones of soil in the plastic state. In particular, the effects on the seabed behaviour of such parameters as the degree of pore water saturation, the soil permeability, and the earth pressure coefficient, are illustrated.