Swelling Behaviour of Compacted Soils in the Earth Dams

Compacted earth fill structures and embankments are subjected to swelling when exposed to water. The extent of the swelling depends on the composition of the soil and occurs only if the swelling pressure is greater than the effective stress in the soil body. It is necessary to predict the magnitude of swelling pressure and the percentage of swelling. In other words, swelling potential should be predicted for the structures such as earth fill structures, which are exposed to water. In this study, in order to make an appropriate prediction of the swelling potential, more than a hundred swelling tests were carried out in the laboratory on four different soils of various degrees of compaction. Previous works have shown that many factors contribute to the swelling potential. For this reason, the description of test soils, soil preparations, the preparation of swelling test specimens and test procedures are presented extensively. In this paper, the swelling potential was determined as the percentage of swelling under 7, 20, 40 kN/m2 (7,20,40 kPa) surcharge pressure, and it was given a simple graphical method to estimate the total swelling of the earth fill structures on exposure to water.

Keywords:

Dams , Earth fill Structures , Compacted soil , Swelling potential