Soil Water Characteristic Curves of Compacted Marine Clay

The soil water characteristics play an important role in predicting the engineering behaviour of unsaturated soils. An experimental programme was performed using pressure plate apparatus to investigate the effect of moulding water content, compactive effort and cycles of wetting and drying on Soil Water Characteristic Curves (SWCC) of compacted marine clay. The specimens were prepared with moulding water contents (optimum, dry of optimum and wet of optimum) for both Standard Proctor and Modified Proctor compactive efforts. The results obtained were fitted to Brooks and Corey (BC) and Van Genuchten (VG) models. The study indicated that SWCC for specimens with higher compactive efforts plotted above those with lower compactive efforts. It was observed that the variation in moulding water content had no significant effect in the resulting SWCC. With the increase in the number of cycles of wetting and drying, a decrease in the water retention capacity was observed.