Experimental bench for study of settling-consolidation soil formation

Alain Alexis (1) , Gilbert Lebras (1) , Pierre Thomas (1)

1 GeM - Institut de Recherche en Génie Civil et Mécanique

A laboratory experimental bench suiting the evolution survey of little concentrated materials in the course of deposition is presented here. The materials concerned can be in formation soils (mud) or any other fine granular materials, however, all characterized by their strong deformability and by their complex behaviour with constant changes from settling to consolidation phases. First, the already available experimental devices are summed up in a state-of-the-art section. The restraints imposed by the material (properties, consistency, quick evolution) have directed the development towards automated settings consisting of a column containing the material studied, a gammadensitometer and a pressure sensor. The device proposed here, the experimental procedures and the result post-processing are described in detail to provide an accurate follow up of the densities and of the interstitial excess pore pressures. The most original feature of the device lies in the possibility to obtain profiles within the first minutes of the evolution. The results, presented here in terms of effective stress and pore pressure, make it possible to delimit the range of validity of the usually adopted constitutive laws better.

Mots clés: gammadensitometer; pore pressure; sedimentation; consolidation; soils; mud

Domaines: Mécanique [physics.med-ph]; Matériaux

Alain Alexis, Gilbert Lebras, Pierre Thomas. Experimental bench for study of settling-consolidation soil formation. Geotechnical Testing Journal, 2004, 27 (6), pp.557-567. ⟨10.1520/GTJ11582⟩. ⟨hal-01006838⟩