Properties of membrane filter and its application to undrained cyclic triaxial test of unsaturated materials

The properties of the recently introduced membrane filter as an alternative of the ceramic disk are revealed through diffusion and hydraulic conductive tests. It is shown that diffusion of air through the membrane filter is significantly affected by the suction magnitude and the hydraulic conductivity of the membrane filter may easily affected by the quality of water used in the test. The application of the membrane filter to the soil water characteristic curve tests (SWCC tests) shows that similar SWCCs can be obtained by employing pressure plate apparatuses installed either the ceramic dicks or the membrane filter, and repeatability of the membrane filter pressure plate apparatus is reasonably good. The application of the membrane filter to the undrained cyclic loading test of unsaturated sandy materials shows that the response (the duration to measure the equilibrated pore water pressure of unsaturated materials) of the membrane filter pedestal in a modified triaxial system may be as short as ~2 seconds in certain test conditions, and fairly good pore water and air pressure measurements can be obtained during undrained cyclic loading with the loading frequency of 0.1 Hz.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author