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Cranfield University

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Appendix<br />

Figure 24. The VCL created in this experiment is intermediate between the ones from<br />

O’Sullivan et al. (1998) and Leeson and Campbell (1983).<br />

Relative Density<br />

2<br />

1,9<br />

1,8<br />

1,7<br />

1,6<br />

1,5<br />

1,4<br />

1,3<br />

Common VCL<br />

O'Sullivan et al. (1999)<br />

Full Pressure<br />

0.38 Pressure<br />

Leeson&Campbell (1983)<br />

1 10 100 1000<br />

Mean Normal Pressure (kPa)<br />

Figure 24: VCLs from O’Sullivan et al. (1998), Leeson and Campbell (1983), and the one<br />

gained by mere confining pressure<br />

11.1.5.1.3 Water Compressibility<br />

All the previous curves do not take water compressibility and the elasticity of the triaxial<br />

system into account. Therefore the elastic response of the system including the water was<br />

evaluated by pressurizing the cell without a sample three times up to 350 kPa and relieving<br />

the pressure again. As the graph in Figure 25 shows there is a close agreement between<br />

pressurizing and relieving the pressure. Only leaving the total pressure applied to the system<br />

as in the last run shifts the curve slightly but on depressurizing it reaches the origin again.<br />

Compressibility has an influence on the results because approximately 25 cm 3 are necessary<br />

to reach a cell pressure of 250 kPa. With a sample volume of 538 cm 3 , 25 cm 3 represent 4.6 %<br />

of the entire sample volume. Taking the compressibility into account which has been<br />

disregarded in the previous figures, however, shifts the virgin compression line further away<br />

from the origin on the horizontal axis thereby making the soil to appear even stronger.<br />

To evaluate the influence of the water compressibility Figure 26 shows one arm of the<br />

pressurizing curves from Figure 25 including a quadratic regression function. The regression<br />

Ph.D. Thesis Dirk Ansorge (2007)<br />

222

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