Abstract
More and more oceanic projects involve calcareous sand–marine clay mixtures which behave totally different from pure calcareous sand and marine clay. The effect of clay content on the compression behavior of the calcareous sand–marine clay mixture is investigated in this study. The results reveal that the coefficient of volumetric compressibility mv will be affected significantly by the clay content at low stress state (i.e., vertical stress less than 600 kPa), but the influence of the clay content on mv can be neglected at high stress states. Further laboratory tests found that the effect of clay content on the creep behavior is negligible for a marine clay fraction of 30% or less, but the effect increases with clay contents larger than 30%. In addition, the particle breakage characteristics are investigated from particle size distributions before and after application of loading in oedometer tests. A general correlation is obtained from the test data to evaluate particle breakage ratio Br by clay content r and magnitude of load p. Finally, a modified conceptual model based on Lade’s transitional fine content (TFC) model is proposed to predict the transitional state of the mixture by considering volume change induced by the sand breakage. The model is used to analyze the critical clay content at transitional state based on some reasonable assumptions and a very good prediction can be obtained.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (project No. 41972271, No. 51908235), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Wuhan University of Technology (project No. 193106001) and the Post-Doctoral Science Foundation of China (2018M632863).
Notation
The following symbols are used in this paper:
- Br
- particle breakage ratio;
- normalized particle breakage ratio;
- Br−0
- particle breakage ratio for pure calcareous sand;
- Cc
- compression index;
- Cα
- secondary compression index;
- Dr
- relative density;
- e
- void ratio;
- eapp
- apparent void ratio;
- eg
- void ratio of sand skeleton;
- emax
- maximum void ratio;
- emin
- minimum void ratio;
- es
- void ratio of clay;
- F
- volume reduction factor;
- F1
- volume reduction factor by rearrangement of particles;
- F2
- volume reduction factor by broken intragranular pores;
- G
- specific gravity;
- Gc
- specific gravity for clay;
- Gg
- specific gravity for calcareous sand;
- mv
- coefficient of volumetric compressibility;
- p
- external load;
- r
- clay content;
- rc
- critical clay content;
- t
- time;
- Vadd
- additional free void volume;
- Vg
- volume of sand skeleton;
- Vs
- volume of marine clay solid matrix;
- Vsv
- intrinsic void volume of marine clay;
- Vv
- void volume of sand skeleton;
- wc
- intrinsic water content of clay;
- ΔVb
- volume reduction by particle breakages;
- ΔVb1
- volume reduction factor by rearrangement of particles;
- ΔVb2
- volume reduction factor by broken intragranular pores;
- Δeb
- void ratio reduction by particle breakages from e-log(σv) curve; and
- σv
- consolidation stress.
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Published In
International Journal of Geomechanics
Volume 20 • Issue 9 • September 2020
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 14, 2019
Accepted: Mar 24, 2020
Published online: Jun 17, 2020
Published in print: Sep 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Nov 17, 2020
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