Practical guidelines for connecting critical states, strengths and dilatancies of scalped and natural soils

Résumé fourni par la source

Soil laboratory testing often requires the removal of oversized particles to satisfy specimen-size limitations, resulting in a modified particle size distribution (PSD) that can significantly influence the measured shear strength and volume-change response. This study presents a physically based framework, grounded in fractal theory, for relating the critical state line (CSL) of a scalped soil to that of the original field material. The approach quantifies the vertical shift of the CSL in the ln e – ln p ′ space induced by PSD truncation, while preserving the intrinsic critical state parameters M and λ . This provides a practical tool for estimating the CSL of field-scale materials from laboratory-scaled specimens. Validation against multiple published datasets demonstrates that the predicted CSLs closely match experimental trends, and remain consistent with the observed volume-change behaviour and peak shear strength measurements. The findings show that conventional laboratory results on scalped specimens may substantially misrepresent the behaviour of the in-situ material unless properly corrected. The proposed framework therefore enables more reliable interpretation of strength and state-parameter-dependent behaviour in coarse granular soils where full-scale testing is not feasible.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.