Water Content Ratio: An Effective Substitute for Liquidity Index for Prediction of Shear Strength of Clays

Undrained shear strength of saturated clays is a very important property in geo-technical engineering practice. Since the collection of undisturbed samples and testing the same is difficult task and time consuming process, any attempt to obtain correlations between shear strength and consistency limits would be highly desirable. Several attempts have been made in the past to correlate shear strength with Liquidity index. The computation of Liquidity index involves the value of plastic limit determined by Casagrande thread rolling method; but the determination of the same is relatively a difficult task in geotechnical engineering practice especially so in less plastic soils. It has been shown that a good linear correlation exists between log of shear strength and water content ratio (ratio of water content to liquid limit). With the help of numerous experimental results, it could be established that water content ratio could replace the well-known parameter liquidity index to predict shear strength. This enables to eliminate the determination of the plastic limit. The relation between water content ratio and liquidity index depends on the liquid limit to plastic limit ratio, irrespective of the geological origin of the soil.