Issue |
E3S Web Conf.
Volume 92, 2019
7th International Symposium on Deformation Characteristics of Geomaterials (IS-Glasgow 2019)
|
|
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Article Number | 01010 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Laboratory Experimental Techniques: Particle Scale and Fabric | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/20199201010 | |
Published online | 25 June 2019 |
Soil microstructural changes induced by suffusion: x-ray computed tomography characterization
1
IRSTEA, Research Unit RECOVER, 13182 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 5, France
2
University Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, 3SR, F-38000 Grenoble, France
* Corresponding author: nadia.benahmed@irstea.fr
Suffusion is one mechanism of internal erosion, which occurs in gap-graded or broadly graded soils when the fine particles are detached and transported by the seepage flow through the void space formed by the granular soil skeleton. Suffusion is therefore a particle scale mechanism. During this microscale, the initial soil fabric may change due to both fines migration and coarse grains rearrangement, leading to an increase/decrease of global/local porosity and hydraulic conductivity, besides of a probable appearance of heterogeneity, which can, in turn, impact the mechanical behaviour of the eroded soil. In the literature, suffusion test results give only a macroscopic point of view and fail to quantify the effect of suffusion at the scale of the soil's induced heterogeneities. In this paper, x-ray tomography is used to get microscopic observations of soil sample microstructure evolution during a suffusion test. The results reveal that suffusion is not a homogeneous process; the removal of fine particles takes place mainly around the soil sample circumference leading to a higher void ratio at the periphery. Besides, the inter-granular void ratio decreases significantly but almost uniformly throughout the sample owing to the progressive collapse and reorganization of the coarse grains induced by the loss in fines.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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