Bringing Unsaturated Soil MEchanics into Engineering Practice

摘要

The fundamental theories for unsaturated soil behaviour have become widely accepted in the geotechnical field, and now the challenge isto bring the science into greater use in engineering practice. In order for this to be accomplished, it is necessary that the engineer give consideration to economical means of assessing unsaturated soil propetry functions. Some examples of unsaturated soil property functions are the doefficient of permeability function, water storage function, shear strength function, and volume change function. The mathemational modelling of many problems involving unsaturted soils can be adequately stuided using approximate representations ofthe unsaturated soil property functions. These functins can be dtermined in ways other than through their direct measuement in the laboratory. It is possible to measure the soil-water characteristic curve for a soil and use the information to compute an approximate unsaturated soil porperty function. It is also possible to use the classisfication properties of a soil(e.g.grain size distribution curve) to compute an approximate soil-water characteristic curve or to estimate approximate parameters for a soil-water characteristic curve. In each case, the inforamtion is used in conjunction with the saturated soil propertis to obtain unsaturated soil property functions. Knowledge-based systems operating on large databases of soil-water characteristic cruve data can be of great assistance of assessing unsaturated soil property functions.