Abstract
Tensile strength of soil is indeed one of the important parameters to many civil engineering applications. It is related to wide range of cracks specially in places such as slops, embankment dams, retaining walls or landfills. Despite of the fact that tensile strength is usually presumed to be zero or negligible, its effect on the erosion and cracks development in soil is significant. Thus, to study the tensile strength and behavior of soil several techniques and devices were introduced. These testing methods are classified into direct and indirect ways depending on the loading conditions. The direct techniques including c-shaped mold and 8-shaped mold are in general complicated tests and require high accuracy as they are based on applying a uniaxial tension load directly to the specimen. On the other hand, the indirect tensile tests such as the Brazilian, flexure beam, double punch and hollow cylinder tests provide easy ways to assess the tensile strength of soil under controlled conditions. Although there are many studies in this topic the current state of the art lack of a detailed article that reviews these methodologies. Therefore, this paper is intended to summarize and compare available tests for investigating the tensile behavior of soils.
Highlights
Soil tensile behavior plays a significant role in various engineering applications [1]
Soil is weak in tension [7], engineers often assume the tensile strength of soil to be zero because it is relatively small in comparison to the its compressive strength [1, 8,9,10,11]
Unconfined penetration test is an indirect test adjusted from double punch test by Fang and Fernandez [38] to measure the tensile strength of soil [9]
Summary
Soil tensile behavior plays a significant role in various engineering applications [1]. Many strength improvement methods have been discussed in the literature These efforts encouraged scholars in this filed to introduce and develop several testing techniques to study soil’s tensile behavior [8]. Regardless of that, available testing methodologies are defined into either direct or indirect technique based on the way of applying the load and computing the tensile strength of soil. The current state of the art lack of a detailed study that discusses and compares these developed testing methodologies. These points are rising the need for a comprehensive review that highlight, discuss and compare available techniques to assess the tensile behavior of soil
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