A Review on Correlations for Consolidation Characteristics of Various Soils

Abstract

Settlement is the major problem that arises after the construction of a structure on a soil mass. Consolidation characteristics of soil such as coefficient of consolidation cv, compression index cc, recompression index cr, preconsolidation pressure σ′p play a major role in the settlement behavior of fine grained soil mass. cv represents the rate of consolidation of soil mass. cc and cr are essential in calculating settlement of normally and over consolidated clays respectively. σ′p is determined to find whether the clay is under, normally or over consolidated. These consolidation properties are obtained from graphical constructions after conducting several one dimensional consolidation-oedometer tests. Since this is time consuming, many correlations have been derived between consolidation properties and index properties of soil. Different researchers have used various soil parameters such as liquid limit (wL), plastic limit (wp), natural moisture content (wn), initial insitu void ratio (eo), dry unit weight (γd), plasticity index (Ip), void ratio at liquid limit (eL) etc., as correlative parameters for deriving the correlations. Hence, it is desirable to predict the value of cv, cc, cr and σ′p from the known correlations rather than conducting several tests, to ease the procedures.