Microstructural Study of Hydromechanical Behavior of Slurry Sample

Some tropical soils have distinct behavior due to their structure. In the last decades, new techniques improved the analysis of soil structure and enabled the correlation between the mentioned structure and the hydromechanical behavior of soils. In this work, a hydromechanical and microstructural characterization of slurry state of Brasilia soil was performed. The hydromechanical characterization was made with consolidation and water retention curve tests. The analysis of the structural characteristics of these soils was obtained from mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) test. It is assumed that different samples such as undisturbed soil, compacted soil and slurry have the initial structure affected in a distinct way by external loading. Thus, the main objective was to evaluate how the slurry sample had its structure affected by external loading and, also compare with undisturbed and compacted samples. Furthermore, the results showed that both the water retention curve and the pore size distribution curve are bimodal and that microstructure remained virtually unchanged. Moreover, as loading was increased there was a reduction of the macro pores, either in saturated and unsaturated samples.