Miniature Cone Penetration Tests with Shear Wave Velocity and Electrical Resistivity Measurements in Characterization of Silica Sand

Geotechnical engineering design and analysis require sound identification and characterization of in-situ soil. To characterize is to gather information about the engineering properties of a particular soil which will affect the performance of any structure built on it. As a result of complications associated with the retrieving of undisturbed samples of cohesionless soils, calibration chamber-based experiments under controlled laboratory settings are used for the determination of several geotechnical engineering parameters. The capability of a reduced-scale calibration chamber-based cone penetration testing system along with shear wave velocity and electrical resistivity measurements, to better characterize in-situ soil is examined in this study. Reconstituted clean sand specimens are anisotropically consolidated to different levels of consolidation relative densities to ideally simulate in-situ field conditions. This measured parameters such as cone tip resistance (qc), sleeve friction (fs), shear wave velocity (Vs) and bulk electrical resistivity of soil (ρs) at different consolidation stresses and relative densities have been used to establish improved characterization techniques for any site-specific pre-design geotechnical engineering analyses on silica-based cohesionless soil