Normalizing variation of stiffness and shear strength of compacted fine-grained soils with moisture content

摘要

Variation of the resilient modulus (M_R), elastic modulus (E), and unconfined compression strength (q_u) with the gravimetric watercontent (w) and soil suction (s) for four compacted fine-grained subgrade soils from Canada was determined from experimental studies andinvestigated in this paper. M_R was determined from cyclic triaxial tests and E and q_u were derived from modified unconfined compressiontests. These tests were conducted on identical specimens that were wetted or dried to achieve different values of w and s. Soil suction waseither imposed using the axis-translation technique prior to performing the tests or measured using the filter paper method after conducting thetests. The measured M_R-w, E-w, and q_u-w relationships were found to exhibit similar characteristics when normalized using an approachproposed in this paper. The similarities in the normalized stiffness/shear strength-moisture content relationships found for the four compactedfine-grained soils were also corroborated by the experimental data for several other soils published in the literature. In this paper, the M_R-wrelationships, which are cumbersome to determine, have been successfully predicted from the easy-to-obtain E-w or qu-w relationships basedon such similarity.