Normalizing Variation of Stiffness and Shear Strength of Compacted Fine-Grained Soils with Moisture Content: Fid-Bau Portal

Normalizing Variation of Stiffness and Shear Strength of Compacted Fine-Grained Soils with Moisture Content

Han, Zhong / Vanapalli, Sai K.

Variation of the resilient modulus ( $M_{R}$ ), elastic modulus ( $E$ ), and unconfined compression strength ( $q_{u}$ ) with the gravimetric water content ( $w$ ) and soil suction ( $s$ ) for four compacted fine-grained subgrade soils from Canada was determined from experimental studies and investigated in this paper. $M_{R}$ was determined from cyclic triaxial tests and $E$ and $q_{u}$ were derived from modified unconfined compression tests. These tests were conducted on identical specimens that were wetted or dried to achieve different values of $w$ and $s$ . 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 $M_{R} - w$ , $E - w$ , and $q_{u} - w$ 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 $M_{R} - w$ relationships, which are cumbersome to determine, have been successfully predicted from the easy-to-obtain $E - w$ or $q_{u} - w$ relationships based on such similarity.