Consolidation: Transient Flow of Water
Consolidation is a process by which soils decrease in volume. It occurs when stress is applied to a soil that causes the soil particles to pack together more tightly, therefore reducing volume. When this occurs in a soil that is saturated with water, water will be squeezed out of the soil. The time required to squeeze the water out of a thick deposit of clayey soil layer might be years. For a layer of sand, the water may be squeezed out in a matter of seconds. A building foundation or construction of a new embankment will cause the soil below to consolidate and this will cause settlement which in turn may cause distress to the building or embankment. Karl Terzaghi developed the theory of consolidation which enables prediction of the amount of settlement and the time required for the settlement to occur. Soils are tested with an oedometer test to determine their compression index and coefficient of consolidation.
When stress is removed from a consolidated soil, the soil will rebound, drawing water back into the pores and regaining some of the volume it had lost in the consolidation process. If the stress is reapplied, the soil will re-consolidate again along a recompression curve, defined by the recompression index. Soil that has been consolidated to a large pressure and has been subsequently unloaded is considered to be overconsolidated. The maximum past vertical effective stress is termed the preconsolidation stress. A soil which is currently experiencing the maximum past vertical effective stress is said to be normally consolidated. The overconsolidation ratio, (OCR) is the ratio of the maximum past vertical effective stress to the current vertical effective stress. The OCR is significant for two reasons: firstly, because the compressibility of normally consolidated soil is significantly larger than that for overconsolidated soil, and secondly, the shear behavior and dilatancy of clayey soil are related to the OCR through critical state soil mechanics; highly overconsolidated clayey soils are dilatant, while normally consolidated soils tend to be contractive.
Read more about this topic: Soil Mechanics
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