Strength of Weakly Cemented Sands from Drained Multistage Triaxial Tests

Abstract

Characterizing the strength of weakly cemented and sensitive soils in the laboratory is difficult because of the difficulty in obtaining high-quality replicate samples necessary for defining the failure envelope. Multistage triaxial tests have long been used to reduce the variability caused by testing multiple samples; however, traditional criteria used for transitioning from one loading stage to another often lead to destructuring or failure in sensitive or structured soils. The objective of this paper is to present a methodology for conducting multistage drained triaxial tests on weakly cemented sands and estimating the resulting shear strength parameters. Both multistage and single-stage drained triaxial tests were performed on artificially cemented samples of a silty sand at two levels of densities and cementation. The use of