Date
02 Jun 1988, 10:30 am - 3:00 pm
Abstract
The piping failure of the Senekal dam and many other small dams in South Africa, despite the use of apparently sound material and good control during construction, emphasizes the need for a method to unambiguously identify dispersive soils. Physical and chemical tests of one hundred and seventy soil samples were evaluated against the double hydrometer method, after removal of free salts. The chemical methods based on characterization of the exchange complex (CEC and ESP) gave consistently more reliable results than the physical tests, such as the pinhole, crumb and sticky point tests and even the double hydrometer test when free salts are not removed.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
2nd Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
University of Missouri--Rolla
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 1988 University of Missouri--Rolla, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Von M. Harmse, H. J. and Gerber, F. A., "A Proposed Procedure for the Identification of Dispersive Soils" (1988). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 3.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/2icchge/2icchge-session3/3
A Proposed Procedure for the Identification of Dispersive Soils
The piping failure of the Senekal dam and many other small dams in South Africa, despite the use of apparently sound material and good control during construction, emphasizes the need for a method to unambiguously identify dispersive soils. Physical and chemical tests of one hundred and seventy soil samples were evaluated against the double hydrometer method, after removal of free salts. The chemical methods based on characterization of the exchange complex (CEC and ESP) gave consistently more reliable results than the physical tests, such as the pinhole, crumb and sticky point tests and even the double hydrometer test when free salts are not removed.
