Importance of volumetric shrinkage curve (VSC) for determination of soil–water retention curve (SWRC) for low plastic natural soils

Abstract

The study of unsaturated behavior of soils pivots around the relationship between soil suction and the amount of water content present in the soil mass, which is termed as soil–water retention curve (SWRC). The drying SWRC is generally determined by neglecting the volume change behavior of the soil for low plastic soils. Such a procedure is bound by an inherent assumption that the soil exhibit zero or negligible volume change and can lead to approximations in important SWRC parameters, including saturated volumetric water content, residual water content, and fitting parameters, which are essential for the estimation of unsaturated hydraulic characteristics of the soil. This study deals with the determination of SWRC parameters for a range of soils starting from non-plastic to high plastic soils, with and without considering volume change characteristics. For this purpose, the SWRC of six different natural soils were experimentally measured using a miniature tensiometer (T5) and a dew point potentiometer (WP4C), while the VSC of the used soils were measured using the balloon method. Efforts were made to critically understand the influence of no volume change assumption on the SWRC parameters, unsaturated hydraulic conductivity function, and flow of water through 1D soil column. The experimental results indicated that the no volume change assumption underpredicted the water retention curves of low plastic soils, and this error in SWRC increases with the soil plasticity. The measured VSC of the used soils further revealed that there could be a range of saturated volumetric water content (VWC) depending on the initial state of the soil sample, which also influences the sensitivity of the SWRC parameters. Therefore, the present study proposed a new methodology to determine unambiguous SWRC (in terms of VWC-suction) for a particular soil type combining both the measured VSC data and SWRC data. Based on the obtained results, it was recommended that the details of VSC must be incorporated along with the measured SWRC data for soils having plasticity and clay content higher than 15 and 11%, respectively.