Abstract
The pore structure is one of the most important properties of soil, which can directly affect the other properties such as water content, permeability and strength. It is of great significance to study the soil pore structure for agricultural cultivation, water and soil conservation and engineering construction. This paper investigates the 3D pore characterization of intact loess and four kinds of compacted loess (with different dry density) in northwest China. Micro scale computed tomography and mercury intrusion porosimetry tests were performed to get the porosity, specific surface area, pore size distribution, connected pores content and isolated pores content of different samples. Results show that the intact loess has more connected pores than the compacted loess, and the compacted loess whose dry density appears to be modelled well still have different pore structure with the intact loess. In addition, as the compactness increasing, the large pores (>13 μm) were firstly broken into medium pores (8~13 μm) and some small pores (<8 μm) until the pore structure was close to the natural structure of the intact loess, after that medium pores began to be broken into small pores.
Highlights
The pore structure is one of the most important properties of soil, which can directly affect the other properties such as water content, permeability and strength
With the continuous increasing of compactness, the large pores in the remolded loess were firstly broken into medium pores and some small pores until the pore structure was close to the natural structure of the intact loess
When the compactness was further increased, a lot of medium pores were broken into small pores
Summary
The pore structure is one of the most important properties of soil, which can directly affect the other properties such as water content, permeability and strength. Et al.[13] analyzed documented changes in particles and micropore structure of loess-like soil during triaxial creep tests with SEM, and pointed out that mesopores which covered the largest area were the most important factors leading to loess-like soil creep. Since the 1980s, mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) has become another quantitative analysis method to study the microstructure of loess, especially the porosity and the pore size distribution (PSD)[14]. Lei[4] studied the PSD characteristics of the loess in China based on mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) tests, and classified loess pores into four types according to the size: the large pores (>0.016 mm in radius), the medium pores (0.016–0.004 mm), the small pores (0.004–0.001 mm) and the micropores (radius
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