The Rapid Soils Analysis Kit—Enabling Contingency Construction Anywhere

As horizontal construction extends into regions of the world with fewer technical resources, simple and compact technologies for remote soil assessment become necessary to reduce risk while increasing durability. To provide the capability to rapidly evaluate and improve soil materials for horizontal construction, a wash-based soil classification and engineering system, named the rapid soils analysis kit (RSAK), was developed. Physically, the wash based RSAK (W-RSAK) consists of a suite of scaled down laboratory soil test equipment packaged in a man portable case including software for predictive analysis. Processing 500 grams of soil material through the W-RSAK guided by an intuitive software user interface can be completed in 60 minutes by a single user. The resulting software output from the W-RSAK consists of a Unified Soil Classification, Atterberg limits, and prediction of the optimum moisture content and maximum dry density. It also includes the complete moisture-density curves at both standard and modified proctor compaction energy and the resultant soaked and unsoaked California Bearing Ratio curves to predict bearing capacity. The W-RSAK procedure was validated through a set of experiments on 14 varying soil types comparing classification and compaction to traditional laboratory and an earlier generation dry-based RSAK procedure. It was demonstrated that the W-RSAK procedure significantly improves classification estimations and is a potential solution to fill engineering gaps in soil design for contingency construction.