Visual approaches of interpreting travel time in bender element experiments may not yield the accurate interpretations in noisy signals, which are often the case in sandy specimens and unsaturated states due to a smaller area of contact between soil particles and the presence of air voids, respectively. Therefore, analysis of received signals in such cases is significantly challenging, requiring knowledge of the effective range of parameters that control the quality of signals. For this purpose, comprehensive sets of bender element experiments are conducted in a modified triaxial device on silty and sandy specimens to monitor the changes in signals clarity with the evolution in unsaturated condition. Experimental results indicate that signals transmitted through more uniformly graded sand specimens carry a higher amount of noise, which is due to the quality of contact between bender elements and soil particles. Regarding the degree of saturation, it is observed that unlike silty specimens, as sandy specimens become drier, the output signals tend to be increasingly distorted.
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