Mechanical Behaviour of Completely Decomposed Granite Soil with Tire Rubber Granules and Fibres

Mixing soil with waste tire rubber granules or fibres is a practical and promising solution to the problem of global scrap tire pollution. Before successful applications, the mechanical behaviour of the soil–rubber mixture must be thoroughly investigated. Comprehensive laboratory studies (compaction, permeability, oedometer and triaxial tests) were conducted on the completely decomposed granite (CDG)–rubber mixtures, considering the effects of rubber type (rubber granules GR1 and rubber fibre FR2) and rubber content (0–30%). Results show that, for the CDG–rubber mixture, as the rubber content increases, the compaction curves become more rubber-like with less obvious optimum moisture content. The effect on permeability becomes clearer only when the rubber content is greater than 30%. The shape effect of rubber particles in compression is minimal. In triaxial shearing, the inclusion of rubber particles tends to reduce the stiffness of the mixtures. After adding GR1, the peak stress decreases with the increasing rubber content due to the participation of soft rubber particles in the force transmission, while the FR2 results in higher peak stress especially at higher rubber contents because of the reinforcement effect. For the CDG–GR1 mixture, the friction angle at the critical state (φ’cs) decreases with the increasing rubber content, mainly due to the lower inter-particle friction of the CDG–rubber interface compared to the pure CDG interface, while for the CDG–FR2 mixture, the φ’cs increases with the increasing rubber content, again mainly due to the reinforcement effect.

Soil Fabric and Transitional Behavior in Completely Decomposed Granite: An Example of Well-Graded Soil

Unlike sedimentary soils, limited studies have dealt with completely decomposed granite (CDG) soils, even though they are plentiful and used extensively in several engineering applications. In this paper, a set of triaxial compression tests have been conducted on well-graded intact and disturbed CDG soils to study the impact of the fabric on soil behavior. The soil behavior was robustly affected by the soil fabric and its mineral composition. The intact soil showed multiple parallel compression lines, while a unique isotropic compression line was present in the case of disturbed soil. Both the intact and disturbed soils showed unique critical state lines (CSL) in both the e-log p′ and q-p′ spaces. The intact soil showed behavior unlike other transitional soils that have both distinct isotropic compression lines ICLs and CSLs. The gradient of the unique ICL of the disturbed soil was much more than that of the parallel compression lines of the intact soil. In the intact soil, the slope of the unique CSL (M) in the q-p′ space was higher than that of the disturbed soil. The isotropic response was present for both the intact and disturbed soils after erasing the inherited anisotropy as the stress increased with irrecoverable volumetric change. Soil fabric is considered the dominant factor in the transitional behavior and such a mode of soil behavior is no longer restricted to gap-graded soil as previously thought.

Effect of Moisture Content on the Shear Behaviour of a Completely Decomposed Granite: An Experimental Study

To figure out the effect of moisture content on the shear behaviour of undisturbed completely decomposed granite (CDG) soil, a series of in situ and laboratory direct shear tests were carried out, under different normal stress and moisture contents. The test results showed that the increasing moisture content could obviously weaken the shear strength, cohesion, and frictional angle. Two linear equations were proposed for estimating the cohesion and the frictional angle at any moisture content in the field. The estimated strength parameters could be used for safety evaluation and/or engineering design of CDG cutting slope. The rate of reduction of the cohesion was much higher than that of the tangent value of frictional angle. Due to the disturbance of laboratory sample and size effect, the strength parameters obtained from the in situ test were a little bit higher than those from the laboratory test.

Thermodynamic-based cross-scale model for structural soil with emphasis on bond dissolution

The immersion weakening effect of natural soil has always been a difficult problem encountered in geotechnical engineering practice. The bond dissolution is a common cause of soil strength deterioration, which remains not well understood yet. In this study, a thermodynamic-based constitutive model of structural soils based on the α model is first established, considering the bond strength by modifying the yield surface size and gradually reducing the bond strength with the development of plastic strain. Furthermore, by taking the meso-mechanisms of bond dissolution into account, the evolution rule of the free energy during the bond dissolution process is derived based on a homogenization approach, and a thermodynamic-based constitutive model of structural soil with bond dissolution is thereafter developed. By comparing with the results of one-dimensional compression tests and conventional triaxial tests, the model is verified to be capable of reflecting the gradual destructuration process of soil while loading. The comparison with triaxial test results of completely decomposed granite after different immersion durations and parametric studies show that based on the cross-scale energy equivalence, the model can well reflect the strength deterioration characteristics of completely decomposed granite with bond dissolution mechanisms at the mesoscale fully considered.

Effect of Loading Path on the Mechanical Properties of Completely Decomposed Granite Soil Based on the Multiscale Method

Mechanical properties of intact completely decomposed granite (CDG) soil, widely distributed in South China, decrease drastically as encountering external load-related disturbance or soaked by water. In this study, staged triaxial consolidated drained (CD) test and microscopic scanning were conducted using intact CDG specimens extracted from a construction site to investigate the mechanical behavior and microscopic pore distribution. The results show that the stress-strain relationship reveals a shrinking behavior in the first-stage loading and a brittle behavior in the second-stage loading. The development of cracks is affected by the principal stress, which causes the pores and cracks to shrink or partially close. In addition, Esec-1 increases linearly with the increase of confining pressure, but Esec-2 decreases exponentially.

Effects of inclusion of granulated rubber tires on the mechanical behaviour of a compressive sand

Drained triaxial shearing tests were performed on a well-graded compressive sand (completely decomposed granite, CDG) and its mixtures with granulated rubber tires to investigate the effects of rubber size and content on their mechanical behaviour. Three sizes of rubber particles, GR1, GR2, and GR3, were used with size ratios to CDG (D50,rubber : D50,CDG) of 0.9, 3.5, and 7.2, respectively, and the rubber content ranged from 0% to 30%. The results show that for CDG–GR1 mixtures, the strength decreases with increasing rubber content, while for CDG–GR2 and CDG–GR3 mixtures, the strength decreases only at 10% rubber content and then increases markedly with increasing rubber content. The increase of strength is mainly because the inclusion of large rubber particles widens the particle size distributions of the mixtures, resulting in denser packings. The denser packings also lead to a decrease in compressibility. At larger size ratio and higher rubber content, the CDG–rubber mixtures show higher shear strength and lower compressibility than pure CDG, which indicates the CDG–rubber mixtures are very suitable to be used as filling materials.