Normalizing Variation of Stiffness and Shear Strength of Compacted Fine-Grained Soils with Moisture Content
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 143, Issue 9
Abstract
Variation of the resilient modulus (), elastic modulus (), and unconfined compression strength () with the gravimetric water content () and soil suction () for four compacted fine-grained subgrade soils from Canada was determined from experimental studies and investigated in this paper. was determined from cyclic triaxial tests and and were derived from modified unconfined compression tests. These tests were conducted on identical specimens that were wetted or dried to achieve different values of and . Soil suction was either imposed using the axis-translation technique prior to performing the tests or measured using the filter paper method after conducting the tests. The measured , , and relationships were found to exhibit similar characteristics when normalized using an approach proposed in this paper. The similarities in the normalized stiffness/shear strength–moisture content relationships found for the four compacted fine-grained soils were also corroborated by the experimental data for several other soils published in the literature. In this paper, the relationships, which are cumbersome to determine, have been successfully predicted from the easy-to-obtain or relationships based on such similarity.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the China Scholarship Council (CSC)—University of Ottawa Joint Scholarship; the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, Canada (MTO); and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 143 • Issue 9 • September 2017
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©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 24, 2016
Accepted: Mar 13, 2017
Published online: Jun 8, 2017
Published in print: Sep 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Nov 8, 2017
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