Identification of Collapsible Soil Using the Fall Cone Apparatus

Soils that go through a great loss of volume upon wetting with or without additional loads are identified as collapsible. In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness of this type of soil due to the expansion of urban developments to arid regions. Also man-made earth structures often exhibit collapsing behavior when compacted at water content less than the optimum moisture content. In the literature, methods can be found to predict this behavior based on field and laboratories test results. These methods, however, are time consuming and developed for the type of soils tested. This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation on collapsible soils using the fall cone and the oedometer apparatuses. The fall cone method, originally developed to determine liquid and plastic limits of soils, was adopted in this investigation to identify its collapse potential. A cone penetration limit (Plim) is introduced to identify collapsible soil and a correlation between the collapse potential, CP, and the cone penetration, P, was developed and validated with the present experimental results and those available in the literature. Furthermore, a simple procedure is introduced to determine the optimum Proctor Moisture Content for collapsible soils from the results of the cone test. The proposed procedure is simple and fast to evaluate soil collapsibility by a single reading of the cone penetration.