Shear strength of cemented soil using triaxial loading

The study on cemented soil has been increasingly important over the past 2 decades and it had drawn many researchers’ attention about the importance of strength and results of it could help engineers to understand the behavior of the artificial soil so that buildings could be constructed safely on it. Hence the main objective of this report is to study on the shear strength on an artificial soil by conducting undrained and drained triaxial loading tests. The material used was Sand and Kaolin mixture (50% sand and 50% kaolin) for preparing the samples. The main advantage of using this artificial soil was it is difficult to obtained samples that are truly undisturbed. The use of triaxial loading also has the advantage of more reliable and higher accuracy of results over the other methods. In order to have a range of readings, mean effective pressure of 100, 300, 500 and 700 kPa were used in the tests and OCR value of 1.1, 3 and 5 were selected for making comparison for the shear strength of the soil. Test results for both undrained and drained triaxial tests were shown, analyzed and discussed. The results showed that though a constant OCR power could not be achieved but higher OCR value does lead to a higher OCR power. It was observed that specimen with the highest OCR value of 5.5 has the highest deviator stress of 609.162 kPa at the mean effective pressure of 100 kPa under the undrained condition. Higher friction angle with low mean effective was observed for samples with higher OCR that directly leads to higher shear strength of the soil. Specimens in undrained condition were also found to have higher strength compared to specimens in drained condition.Bachelor of Engineering (Civil