Consolidation of soft soil

Abstract

Project relevance: For construction of roads and embankments, soil material must be compacted to its densest state, which will result in higher soil strength and long-term stability. To obtain the compaction characteristics of soil, engineers conduct a series of laboratory standard compaction tests and then use these data for field compaction. In this project, an embankment will be built as part of a pre-load method to consolidate the soft alluvial clay (more details about consolidation are given in Chapter 10) using the sand from Pit 1. We are required to interpret and analyse data from compaction tests on this sand. This section will introduce the concept of soil compaction and discuss how to determine compaction characteristics of soil.