Abstract
To study effect of plasticity on shear behavior of low-plasticity fine-grained soil, a Mississippi River Valley (MRV) silt with a plasticity index (PI) of 5.8 was treated with different dosages of sodium bentonite to modify its plasticity up to a PI of 13.5. The naturally occurring material originated from the MRV exhibited dilative behavior under normally consolidated conditions. The silt-bentonite mixtures tend to lose quasi-steady-state strength and dilative characteristics as the plasticity increased. At a PI of 13.5, the silt-bentonite mixture had plastic stress-strain clay-like behavior. Overconsolidation did not influence the friction angle of the natural silt, but for silt-bentonite mixtures with PIs of 6.2 and 9.4 the influence of prestress was evident. The normalized shear strength was significantly reduced with an increase in PI from 5.8 (natural MRV silt) to 6.0 (natural MRV silt with 2.5% bentonite added). Compared to the predictive relationships proposed by other researchers, the normalized shear strength of the natural silt was clearly higher. The critical PI was about 6 to differentiate clay-like soil and intermediate soil for the subject silt. The PI was found not to be an ideal parameter to identify the transformation of the shear behavior of the MRV silt, because the shear behavior had a big change with a slight change of PI.
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Acknowledgments
The financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51208516) and the Postdoctoral Foundation Program of Central South University are appreciated. This work would not have been possible without the financial and technical support of the geotechnical laboratory of the Dept. of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at Missouri S&T. Also, the assistance of authors’ colleagues, including Louis Ge, Site Onyejekwe and Xin Kang, is gratefully appreciated.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 29 • Issue 3 • March 2017
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 2, 2015
Accepted: Jul 11, 2016
Published online: Sep 23, 2016
Discussion open until: Feb 23, 2017
Published in print: Mar 1, 2017
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