Index Properties Of Soils:

[nurhforward]

My Kind greetings,
Recently developments in geotechnical processes and soil machanics now demands the engineers to dig-deep into soil testing, boring and inspections especially before, during and post construction activities. These tests are vital as the aids both the geotechnical and structural engineers in their designs and judgement.

Among these tests are: Liquid Limits (LL),Plastic Limits (PL), Plastic Index (PI), Compaction, Compressibility, Settlement,Grading/Seive Analysis among range of other standard tests conducted on soils and rocks in other to determine their engineering behaviours.

To this end, changes in the environments, construction methods and procedures,codes/standards (eg EUROCODES),
lab testings etc. now demands the geotechnical to carry out 'modern' testing on soils and rocks...
Can anyone throw more light on these ?

Enjoy !

nurhforward, Gitto International.

 

[msucog]

here in the u.s. (at least from my perspective) i can only perform what i am i contracted to do. for construction related activities, i am far from playing the construction police. the contractor is a big boy and can be responsible for themselves. if they do something stupid, it's their problem. if i happen to see it and it impacts something related to me, then i'll bring it up. as far as other testing, i cannot force anyone to pay for anything. if i see that settlement for instance may significantly impact my recommendations, then i have little choice but to evaluate it.

as far as "modern", i think the exploration/testing has been somewhat unchanged for a while (but with obvious revisions). i would say that due new enforcement of the international building codes, owners are now being forced to have certain exploration/testing performed. i always think it's ironic that it's so hard to save people from themselves sometimes.

 

[BigH]

Please explain "modern" testing. The tests you mentioned - Atterbergs, compressibility (which I take it is consolidation), etc have been around for a long long time. Some changes obviously in that LL can now be done using a fall cone - even the plastic limit is now starting to gain a fall cone status (where PL = 200 kPa Su value compared to LL = 2 kPa). Don't know how you do a "settlement" test unless you are talking plate load test in the field or something.

As muscog says - it is fine for the codes to push "testing" or whatever else they want to push (like forcing bearing capacity computations even though everyone knows it is the serviceabilty limits - not the ultimate that govern most cases) - but interestingly, the codes don't give prescriptive costs that are to be paid for these services!!! Tell me how a residential homeowner will want to pay thousands for fancy tests - when all he wants to know is that the site is safe to build on - a few extra cm on the size of the footing for his project is still well cheaper than what the codes seem to want to push.