Small strain dynamic behavior of two types of carbonate sands

The study reports on the small-strain dynamic behavior of two types of carbonate sands from Western Australia and the Philippines. Basic characterization of the soils was performed in terms of specific gravity, grading information, angle of shear strength at critical state, particle shape characterization and composition analysis. Piezo-element inserts were utilized to carry out the dynamic tests. For the Western Australia (WA) carbonate sand, both bender and extender element tests were performed, thus the shear modulus, the Young's modulus and the Poisson's ratio were examined. Both vertical and lateral bender element tests were performed on a set of specimens from the Philippines (PH) carbonate sand to study the shear modulus and, from which, no fabric anisotropy of the reconstituted specimens was found. It was observed that the overconsolidated specimens had higher stiffness than those during the first loading stages for both carbonate sands. In the pressure range of the study, grain breakage was small and its effect on the behavior of the samples was almost negligible. Empirical equations in the literature proposed from quartz sands could not predict the stiffness of the carbonate soils satisfactorily. In this regard, a preliminary study was carried out adopting the assumed void ratio that only considers the inter-particle voids instead of the summation of inter- and intra-particle voids; based on this concept, the predicted and measured stiffness (including both small-strain shear modulus, G_max and small-strain Young's modulus, E_max) were found to be satisfactorily close.