Experimental Study on Flexural Testing of Compacted Soil Beams
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 22, Issue 5
Abstract
This paper presents an experimental study on flexural testing of three different types of soils molded at three different water contents and two different compaction energies. For this purpose, a custom designed simple beam test setup was developed in the laboratory for inducing the controlled pure bending to the soil under evaluation together with a charged coupled device video camera mounted on to a moving triaxial base plate. Based on the analysis and interpretation of bending moment (BM)-curvature relationships of tested soil beams, effects of soil type, molding water content, and compaction energy on the flexural behavior could be obtained. For the varied molding water contents and for the range of plasticity indices varied, with an increase in plasticity index of the soil and molding water content, a trend of increasing tensile strain at crack initiation was observed. In comparison, flexural tensile strength at crack initiation was observed to decrease with an increase in molding water content. Further, flexural rigidity at crack initiation was found to be higher for soils having low plasticity index and moist compacted at low-molding water contents. The developed test setup is capable of inducing distortion levels of 0.105 and can be useful in assessing flexural characteristics of different types of fine-grained soils.
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Acknowledgments
The writers thank the staff at the geotechnical engineering laboratory of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay for their active involvement during the course of the study. Thanks are also due to reviewers for their critical review and suggestions for improving the quality of this manuscript.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 22 • Issue 5 • May 2010
Pages: 460 - 468
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Sep 14, 2008
Accepted: Aug 28, 2009
Published online: Sep 1, 2009
Published in print: May 2010
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