413-19
Quantifying Shrink Swell Capacity of Soil Using Soil Moisture Isotherms.

Poster Number 2534

Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Tampa Convention Center, East Hall, Third Floor

Leonardo Daniel Rivera1, Douglas R. Cobos1, Colin S. Campbell1 and Cristine L. S. Morgan2, (1)Decagon Devices, Inc., Pullman, WA
(2)Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Vertisols, soils instinctively known for their expansive clays that cause them to have a high shrink swell potential, cover 2.4% of the earths ice-free land.  In the United States these expansive soils can cause upwards of 6 billion in damages to pavements, foundations, and utility lines annually (Brady & Weil, 2010).  Because of this, it is especially important that a soils ability to shrink and swell is well characterized when making engineering decisions.  One traditional method for measuring a soil’s expansive potential, the Coefficient of Linear Extensibility (COLE), can take weeks to months to complete (Grossman et al., 1968; Schafer and Singer, 1976b). Use of soil moisture isotherms, or the Soil Moisture Characteristic Curve (SMCC), in recent research has shown that the slope of the SMCC is related to a soils swelling potential (McKeen, 1992). 

The goal of this research is to evaluate the robustness of the relationship between the SMCC and COLE for a set of well-characterized test soils with COLE ranging from 0 to 0.176.  If expansive potential can be reliably predicted from the SMCC, then data from recently developed automatic soil moisture isotherm generators could be used to characterize expansive potential with a fraction of the time and effort necessary for traditional techniques.

See more from this Division: SSSA Division: Soil Physics
See more from this Session: General Soil Physics: II

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