Index swelling prediction of clayey soils

¹ Houari Boumediene University, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Algiers, Algeria
² Yahia Fares University of Medea, Faculty of Technology, Department of Civil Engineering, Medea, Algeria

^* Corresponding author: medjnounamel@yahoo.fr, amedjnoun@usthb.dz

Abstract

In civil engineering, statistical studies are widely used in risk studies of landslides, seismic, swelling-shrinking and other hazard studies. This study deals with a volumetric deformation of the clayey soil by water absorption, which is the phenomenon of swelling. It is a serious problem for lightweight structures such as highways. This phenomenon is characterized by two mechanical parameters measured by an oedometric test carried out in the laboratory, which takes a long time and is expensive, why scientists have always looked for other quick and less expensive alternatives to estimate these parameters. They developed models between classical parameters, easily determined in the laboratory, such as water content, dry density, percent of clay particles, plasticity index and mechanical properties of clay soils. The developed models are based on descriptive statistics, a neural network, or multiple regressions. To estimate the risk of swelling and to verify the applicability of the models of the literature on the Algerian soils, a database was collected from the geotechnical reports carried out on the sites of certain projects in Algeria. The objective of the present study consists of estimating the mechanical parameter of swelling, which is the swelling index from a set of physical tests carried out in the laboratory.