Who is doing your lab testing? What country ar you in? Again, I would check out their testing times to failure. To measure pwp in clays, it will take nearly 8 hours or even more to complete one stage for the triaxial. With phi' equals 9deg - either the material you have is "fully disturbed" and you are measuring the residual friction angle - or the test is too fast and the pwp do not fully equalize across the sample. Observe them doing a test - when I confronted the tech in Jakarta back in 1988 who, bhy the way, was a graduate of the Asian Institute of Technology outside Bangkok (good school) - he told me that he failed the pwp test in 20 minutes. I told him it was too fast - he insisted and went to get his book to show me - and I showed him where he had misread - or misunderstood - what the book said.