ESTIMATION OF ACTIVE CLAY CONTENT USING ATTERBERG LIMITS PARAMETERS

This paper presents models that estimate the active clay content of the soil based on the correlation between the ratio of the second and first norm of the idealized fall cone curve (distance factor)  and the  arithmetic  difference  between  the  plasticity index and the clay content (clay index). The models were developed based on an analysis of 306 test results of clay content and Atterberg limits collected from  the  literature.  The  models  were  found to compute the active clay limit reasonably well, with most of the calculated results falling within the statistical testing bound of  ±12 as provided in AASHTO T88-10.