An Appreciation of Modified Cam Clay

Abstract

This paper presents an appreciation of the importance of the paper “On the generalised stress-strain behaviour of ‘wet’ clay” by Roscoe and Burland (1968), which sets out the Modified Cam Clay (MCC) framework for understanding the behavior of clays. In the last 50 years MCC has become one of the most important theoretical tools for understanding and modelling soil behaviour. Here I present a number of different aspects of the influence of MCC, as a simple conceptual model which allows hand calculations, as the basis of numerical modelling software, as the starting point for some of the most sophisticated of constitutive models developed today, and as a vehicle for discussion of fundamental features of soil behavior as a scientific topic.