Abstract:

A number of isotropic compression and consolidated-drained and undrained triaxial tests on undisturbed and reconstituted Suzhou clay have been carried out to study the compression and shear characteristics. The comparison of compression curves of undisturbed and reconstituted samples shows that the undisturbed samples have larger void ratio, compression index and swell index under the same confining pressure. The comparison of stress ratio-strain curves of undisturbed and reconstituted samples shows that the confining pressure has no effect on the reconstituted samples but has an effect on the undisturbed samples. In other words, the stress ratio is high with shearing at the low confining pressure. Also, strength of undisturbed samples is lower than the reconstituted samples when sheared under the same confining pressure. This behavior is caused by the difference in void ratio.

Key words: undisturbed soil; reconstituted soil; deformation characteristic; isotropic compression test; consolidated-drained test