Soil Mechanics by Hand: Phase Relations, Grading & Plasticity, Compaction, Effective Stress, Permeability, Consolidation Settlement, Shear Strength & Bearing Capacity

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn the wet mass, dry mass and volume of four tube samples into water content, void ratio, porosity and degree of saturation, then into bulk, dry and saturated unit weights.
• Turn a sieve analysis into % passing, interpolate D10, D30 and D60 on a log size scale, compute Cu and Cc, fit the liquid limit at 25 blows and look up a plasticity term in a fictional chart.
• Reduce five compaction points to dry densities, find the maximum dry density and the optimum water content, draw the zero-air-voids line and grade four field tests against a fictional specification.
• Build the total stress, pore pressure and effective stress at each layer boundary of a borehole, chart the profile and see how much effective stress is lost when the water table rises to the surface.
• Reduce a constant-head and a falling-head test to k in m/s, combine three layers into equivalent horizontal and vertical permeabilities and estimate the seepage under a small weir from a flow net.
• Fit the compression index from oedometer data, spread a footing load to the middle of a clay layer with the 2:1 method, estimate the consolidation settlement and how many days it takes to reach 90 %.
• Turn four shear-box tests into normal and shear stresses, fit the Mohr–Coulomb line, read φ′ with DEGREES(ATAN(…)) and c′ from the intercept, and compute the strength at a given effective stress.
• Look up fictional bearing-capacity factors, compute the ultimate and allowable bearing pressure of a square pad, check its settlement against a given limit and tabulate allowable load and settlement for five widths.