How to Overcome Sample Disturbance

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How to overcome sample disturbance?
It is a well known fact that a good quality sample is necessary to get realistic soil parameters. Basically, preserving soil natural structure and stress condition in the laboratory sample determine the quality of soil parameters. However, many researchers pointed out that it is impossible to retain original soil condition even though we use so-called high quality sampler and same in-situ effective stress condition during the laboratory testing. On the other hand, many researchers have tried to overcome such problem of soil disturbance by introducing several methods of correcting soil parameters for poor quality sample. Moreover, recompression method and Stress History and Normalized Soil Engineering Properties (SHANSEP) method are two well known methods employed recently in geotechnical engineering practice.
1) Recompression method
Recompression method was developed by Bjerrum and Berre (1973) at the Norwagian Geotechnical Institute (NGI). In this method, soil specimens are reconsolidated to in-situ effective overburden pressure before sheared under undrained condition. Bjerrum mentioned that the principle behind this technique has been the swelling of sample that occurred before testing is so small and elastic in nature that the mechanical disturbance caused by such swelling can be eliminated by reconsolidating sample exactly as that it is in the in-situ stress condition before testing. Berre and Bjerrum (1973) highlighted that the volumetric strain during recompression should be less than 1.5 to 4%. This method should be used in the case of highly structured, brittle and sensitive clay with high quality sample. It is evident that the low plastic clay samples are found to be somewhat more disturbed than that of high plastic clay samples and reduced water content due to sample disturbance would cause gain in strength. On the contrary, increasing disturbance cause a reduction in strength and an increase in strain for the reconsolidated specimen at the verge of failure. Furthermore, there is some criticism on recompression method that the decrease in void ratio due to densification measure overestimating of strength even for bad quality sample.
2) SHANSEP Method
The SHANSEP method was first established by Ladd and Froott in 1974 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). SHANSEP gives design procedure for clay showing normalized behaviour. It gives a way of taking into account the previous stress history of the soil, particularly overconsolidation. In this method, the sample is consolidated under several times greater stresses than its yield consolidation stress (normally, 1.5 to 4 times) and is then swell back to its field effective stress to minimize the adverse effect of soil disturbance.

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