Predicting the entire soil-water characteristic curve using measurements within low suction range

作     者：YE Yun-xue ZOU Wei-lie HAN Zhong LIU Xiao-wen 

作者机构：School of Civil Engineering Wuhan University School of Civil Engineering Xijing University School of Architectural Engineering Nanchang University 

出 版 物：《Journal of Mountain Science》 (山地科学学报（英文）)

年 卷 期：2019年第16卷第5期

页      面：1198-1214页

核心收录：

学科分类：08[工学] 080104[工学-工程力学] 0815[工学-水利工程] 0801[工学-力学（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：the National Natural Science Fund of China (Grant Nos. 51779191  51809199) 

主　　题：Unsaturated soils Soil-water characteristic curve Capillary Adsorption Prediction 

摘      要：The soil-water characteristic curve(SWCC) is widely used in the design and evaluation in the practice of geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering such as the slope stability under the influence of environmental factors. The SWCC has distinct features in the capillary and adsorption zones due to different physical mechanisms. Measurements of the SWCC are typically limited within the capillary zone(i.e., low suction range). It is cumbersome and time-consuming to measure the SWCC in the adsorption zone(i.e., high suction range). This study presents a simple method to predict the entire SWCC within both the capillary and adsorption zones, using measured data only from low suction range(e.g., from 0 to 500 kPa). Experimental studies were performed on a completely weathered granite residual soil to determine its entire SWCC from saturated to dry conditions. The resultant SWCC, along with the SWCC measurements of 14 soils reported in the literature, were used to validate the proposed method. The results indicate that the proposed method has good consistency with a wide array of measured data used in this study. The proposed method is easy to use as it only requires a simple parameter calibration for a commonly used SWCC model. It can be used to improve the reliability in the prediction of the SWCC over the entire suction range when measurements are limited within the low suction range.