Abstract: Several characteristics of natural soils complicate the relationship between their mechanical behaviour and geotechnical construction and maintenance in the field. These characteristics include the presence of three phases (solid particle, water, and air), particle constitutions of various minerals (such as quartz, kaolinite, and montmorillonite), and an exceptionally wide range of particle size from μm-scale (clay particles smaller than 2 μm) to 100-mm scale (such as some gravels and pebbles), with complicated inter-particle contact distributions. Field or in-situ testing is the most reliable way to reveal the real conditions for geotechnical engineering (Chen et al., 2021; Xue et al., 2021). However, field testing is sometimes not easy or even not realistic to perform because of resource shortages, time limitations, and difficult operability. To overcome these issues and to reproduce the mechanical or thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical (THMC) coupled behaviours of geotechnical structures, physical model testing is an efficient and reasonable approach, widely used by academics and engineers around the world (Wang et al., 2018; Guo and He, 2020; Bian et al., 2021; Lei et al., 2021; Tang et al., 2022).

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