Book Description

An understanding of the mechanical properties of unsaturated soilsis crucial for geotechnical engineers worldwide, as well as tothose concerned with the interaction of structures with the ground.This book deals principally with fine-grained clays and silts, orsoils containing coarser sand and gravel particles but with asignificant percentage of fines. The study of unsaturated soil is a practical subject, linkingfundamental science to nature. Soils in general are inherentlyvariable and their behaviour is not easy to analyse or predict, andunsaturated soils raise the complexity to a higher level. Evenamongst practicing engineers, there is often lack of awareness ofthe intricacies of the subject. This book offers a perspective ofunsaturated soils based on recent research and demonstrates howthis dovetails with the general discipline of soil mechanics. Following an introduction to the basic soil variables, thephases, the phase interactions and the relevance of soil structure,an up-to-date review of laboratory testing techniques is presented.This includes suction measurement and control techniques intriaxial cell testing. This is followed by an introduction tostress state variables, critical state and theoretical models inunsaturated soils. A detailed description of the thermodynamic principles asapplied to multi-phase materials under equilibrium conditionsfollows. These principles are then used to explore and develop afundamental theoretical basis for analysing unsaturated soils. Soilstructure is broken down into its component parts to developequations describing the dual stress regime. The critical statestrength and compression characteristics of unsaturated soils areexamined and it is shown how the behaviour may be viewed as athree-dimensional model in dimensionless stress-volume space. Theanalysis is then extended to the work input into unsaturated soilsand the development of conjugate stress, volumetric andstrain-increment variables. These are used to examine themicromechanical behaviour of kaolin specimens subjected to triaxialshear strength tests and lead to observations not detectable byother means. Unsaturated Soils: A fundamental interpretation of soilbehaviour covers a rapidly advancing area of study, researchand engineering practice and offers a deeper appreciation of thekey characteristics of unsaturated soil. It provides students andresearchers with a framework for understanding soil behaviour anddemonstrates how to interpret experimental strength and compressiondata. provides engineers with a deeper appreciation of keycharacteristics of unsaturated soils covers a rapidly advancing area of study, research andengineering practice provides students and researchers a framework for understandingsoil behaviour shows how to interpret experimental data on strength andcompression the limited number of books on the subject are all out ofdate