Effect of Fines Content on the Hysteretic Behavior of Water-Retention Characteristic Curves of Reconstituted Soils
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 32, Issue 4
Abstract
An experimental investigation was carried out to evaluate the influence of fines content on the hysteretic behavior of water-retention characteristic curves (WRCCs) of reconstituted soil subjected to wetting and drying cycles. The red soil fines were collected from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Kandi, Sangareddy. An Indian Standard Grade-II sand (i.e., Ennore sand) was reconstituted including red soil fines content of varying percentages (30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, and 100%) by dry weight of sand to produce different soil mixes. The filter paper method was adopted to measure the effect of the fines content on the WRCCs for both drying and wetting cycles. Experimental results revealed that the presence of fines influences the shape of the WRCC. The results further revealed that the WRCC of soil is hysteretic in nature as the water content is less in the wetting path compared to that in the drying path at a constant suction value. Nonlinear regression equations are proposed for the fitting parameters of the WRCC in terms of the liquid and plastic limits for the drying WRCC based on the experimental results. The present study also proposes nonlinear regression equations to predict fitting parameters of the wetting WRCC in terms of the fitting parameters of the drying WRCC. The proposed nonlinear equations are validated for soil collected from Padakal village, Mahbubnagar district, Telangana state, India. A formulation is presented to predict the degree of hysteresis based on the uniform slice method to evaluate the effect of fines content on the hysteretic behavior of WRCCs. The proposed regression fits were compared to existing fits in the literature to validate their authenticity.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or codes generated or used during this study are available from the corresponding author by request (drying and wetting WRCC calculations using Excel spreadsheet, Microsoft, Washington, DC).
Acknowledgments
Financial support for this project was provided by the Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB) which is a statutory body of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India (Grant No. SR/FTP/ETA-026/2012), and partially by the Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development, which is gratefully acknowledged.
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Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 32 • Issue 4 • April 2020
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©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: May 21, 2019
Accepted: Sep 9, 2019
Published online: Feb 4, 2020
Published in print: Apr 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Jul 4, 2020
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