Predicting compaction properties of soils at different compaction efforts

Soil compaction is a key operation regarding the construction of railway, road embankments, earth-dams or clay liners for waste disposals. The standard and the modified Proctor tests are employed to obtain the optimum compaction properties at different energy levels. The choice of the compaction technique depends on the type of compacted earthworks to be carried out. It may happen that the same material deployed in the past for certain engineering work has to be used in a different work requiring different compaction energy. As compaction tests are time-consuming, a preliminary assessment of optimum compaction properties from a certain energy level to another can be useful in geotechnical applications. In this paper two empirical models linking different compaction energy values are presented. Using the liquid limit, it was discussed the possibility to evaluate optimum moisture content and maximum dry unit weight from modified properties. A database of 49 data from the literature has been used to build up a model, which was validated against other 14 independent data. A statistical analysis was carried out. Monte Carlo simulations were also performed. This paper updates the knowledge regarding the compaction at different energy levels using a larger database.