Permeability Determination from On-the-Fly Piezocone Sounding
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 131, Issue 5
Abstract
Solutions are developed for the steady, partially drained, fluid pressure field that develops around a moving penetrometer. These include rigorous solution for a point volumetric dislocation moving in a saturated elastic soil and an approximate solution for a pseudostatic, finite-volume, penetrometer moving in a nondilatant soil. These solutions provide a consistent framework for viewing the penetration process, and enable the nondimensional sounding indices of normalized tip resistance , friction factor , and pore pressure ratio , to be straightforwardly linked to important material properties of the soil, most notably that of permeability, via a nondimensional permeability . This factor is inversely proportional to penetration rate, and is directly proportional to both permeability and vertical in situ effective stress. Simple relationships are developed to link these nondimensional sounding metrics, via . Most notably, the resulting simple relationship enables soil permeability to be determined from peak fluid pressures recorded on-the-fly. Importantly, these parameterizations enable plots of , , and to be contoured for , and hence for permeability. These plots define the relative superiority of using data pairs over those for and , in defining permeability. Similarly, the feasible range of permeabilities that may be recovered from peak pressure data are defined; permeabilities must be sufficiently high that penetration is not undrained, and sufficiently low that the resulting pressure response is not null (fully drained). These limits are a natural product of the analysis and represent permeabilities in the range . The utility of these characterizations is confirmed with data from two locations where cone soundings are correlated with independently estimated permeabilities.
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Acknowledgments
The writers acknowledge the contribution of Molly Gribb in locating important data for the Savannah River site, of Frank Syms for releasing these data, and of the partial support from NSF under Grant No. CMS-0409002.
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© 2005 ASCE.
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Received: Dec 2, 2002
Accepted: Oct 11, 2004
Published online: May 1, 2005
Published in print: May 2005
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