Influence of initial water content on the water retention behaviour of a sandy clay Soil

In order to model the impact of climate changes on the infrastructure for the built environment, such as embankments and cuttings, an understanding of the water retention behaviour is required. To this end, a series of filter paper tests were carried out on remoulded samples of a sandy clay material of medium plasticity. The soil samples were prepared with different initial water contents and dynamically compacted. Filter paper tests were performed to determine the soil water retention curve (SWRC) from a saturated state. Other subsamples were wetted or dried to reach different water contents for testing. The obtained results were then compared with the SWRC. The drying tests showed typical behaviour of scanning curves, however the wetting curves showed untypical behaviour, where the curves appeared to overlap each other with no clear pattern. The observed behaviour from laboratory samples can be extrapolated to field conditions, where future climate change will have a major impact on the water retention behaviour on earth structures, which will have implications for the geo-mechanical behaviour.