DETERMINATION OF COEFFICIENT OF CONSOLIDATION: A USER FRIENDLY APPROACH

Practising geotechnical engineers require a reasonably accurate value of a soil's coefficient of consolidation (cv) for its settlement analysis. This paper proposes a simple, quick, versatile, and reliable procedure, which can estimate the coefficient fairly well, without the need to apply elaborate curve-fitting methods to laboratory data. It is hoped that this method will optimise the time and effort of geotechnical personnel. Its results are compared statistically with those of other methods. The recommended method is a version of the one-point method, which is found to give reasonable estimates for the types of Indian soil considered. The percentage deviations of cv obtained by this method, from results obtained by other methods, are much less than the large variations observed between values of cv obtained by the popular methods of Taylor and Casagrande. The cv values from this one-point method are highly correlated with the average of the cv values obtained from the methods of Taylor and Casagrande.