Experimental Study on Shear Strength of the Soil by Drying Process

Shear strength of the soil is a very important property in geotechnical engineering in order to assess the strength of the soil. In classical soil mechanics, the soil is generally assumed to be fully saturated and completely dry conditions. However most of the natural soils or compacted soils are unsaturated. In the present work to study the compressive strength of the different soils with different moisture contents and are compared to the drying process. It has been observed that the soil in dry state exhibit more strength compared to its wetting side. Soils are mainly formed by the process of weathering of the parent rock. The weathering of rocks might be by mechanical disintegration or chemical decomposition. Mechanical weathering of rocks is due to the action of agents as the expansive forces of freezing of water in fissures, due to sudden changes in temperature or due to abrasion of rock by moving of water or glaciers whereas chemical weathering is due to hydration, oxidation, carbonation, desilication and leaching in hard rocks. Soils occurs in different forms such as Bentonite, black cotton soil, boulders, calcareous soils, caliche, clays, gravel, cobbles, kankar, humus, laterites, loam, marl, peat, sand, silt, loamy etc., according to their size. One of the abundant and the most controversial engineering properties of the soil is its Shear Strength or ability to resist sliding along the internal surfaces within a soil mass or the shear strength of a soil is its maximum resistance to shear stresses just before the failure.