New Simple Breakage Index for Crushable Granular Soils

Abstract

Degradation of geomaterials, that is, particle breakage, can be harmful to the full life-cycle stability of practical engineering; for example, rockfill dam, energy-pile foundation, railway embankment, and retaining wall. A key issue is how to precisely quantify grain crushing during the life-cycle operation of the project that suffers high pressure or dynamic loading. This paper reviews the advantages and limitations of existing particle breakage indices and proposes a new simple breakage index for estimating the evolution of grain crushing. The new index without an integral grading area can be easily and directly obtained from the sieving results and independent of the coordinate of particle size axis. It can also adequately capture the grain crushing at all grain sizes. Moreover, it can be used for uniformly graded, well-graded, and gap-graded crushable soils.