Erosion resistance of cohesive soils

Abstract

This paper presents experimental results on surface erodibility tests performed with undisturbed and remolded samples of cohesive soils. When subjected to shear stress caused by flowing water, erosion occurs in two distinctive modes: particle erosion and mass erosion. Erosion resistance is defined as the applied bed shear stress at which incipient erosion occurs. The ratio of mass erosion to particle erosion resistance ranged from 3.7 to 5.4 for the undisturbed samples. The erosion resistance increased with increase of moist bulk density, and an increase of water content to a certain level (to be termed optimum condition hereafter) and the decrease of the mean sediment size.Water content, plasticity index, and moist bulk density of a soil sample are combined into a single parameter ?. Results of the tests on field samples show that ? and the non-dimensional erosion resistance follow linear relationship. In the erodibility tests of remolded samples, individual soil property was changed to investigate its effect on erosion resistance. The results of the tests on remolded samples show that both normalized particle and mass erosion resistance could be represented by a Gamma distribution of ? with the maximum resistance occurring under a condition that closely resembles the field condition in terms of moist bulk density and water content. An erosion model is presented that can be used to estimate the particle and mass erosion resistance from the measured water content, plasticity index, and the moist bulk density of a cohesive soil sample.