723

DISCUSSIONS

iiz situ tests. Irz Proceedings of the 10th European Conference

on Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, Florence,
Italy. Edited by Associazone Geotecnica Italiana. A.A. Balkema,
Rotterdam. Vol. 3. pp. 915-956.

Garga, V.K. 1991. Laboratory evaluation of K, for overconsolidated clays. Canadian Geotechnical Journal, 28: 650-659.

Estimating coefficient of consolidation from piezocone tests:' Discussion

GARYJONES
Stefleen Robertson and Kirsten, I? 0. Box 35267, Menlo Park, Pretoria, S o ~ ~ Africa
th
AND

EBENRUST
University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
Received February 22, 1993
Accepted April 2, 1993
Can. Geotech. J. 30, 723-724

(1993)

The authors are to be commended for their assembling

of such comprehensive data in a manner that can be used
by practitioners. The discussers, having recently completed
a similar research project for the South African Roads Board,
are acutely aware of the large amount of effort required to
obtain such information. The primary objective of our project was to verify and calibrate the use of the piezocone for
the prediction of embankment settlements on recent alluvial deposits. The secondary objective was to estimate coefficients of consolidation from piezocone data and hence calibrate the prediction of times for settlements. The data base
for this comprised:
( i ) s e t t l e m e n t records f o r u p to 15 years f o r
12 embankments;
( i i ) original site investigation laboratory test results,
including cone penetration test (CPT) data; and
(iii) piezocone results carried out recently for the project
( u 2 filter location, see Fig. I).
At some of the embankments, since the subsoil conditions
were variable, more than one case history could be reconstructed, with the result that a total of 25 separate cases
were available.
It is hoped that the results of the project will be published shortly. In the meantime, however, the essential findings are given below.
Using the conventional equation to derive m, from cone
data, viz.,

where
m, is coefficient of volume compressibility
a,,, is constrained modulus coefficient
q, is cone pressure.
Then a, may be determined from the piezocone results in
'paper by P.K. Robertson, J.P. Sully, D.J. Woeller, T. Lunne,
J.J.M. Powell, and D.G. Gillespie. 1992. Canadian Geotechnical
Journal, 29: 539-550.
Printed i n Canada 1 Imprlm6 au Canada

0.i

10

100

im

ioooo

t m , mln

FIG. 1. Comparison between back-analyzed and laboratory c,,

values for CPTU t,, values for LL? pore-pressure location.
conjunction with both settlement data and laboratory results
to give field a,, and laboratory a, .The results from the
settlement records and the piezocone results show that
Field a, = 2.75 0.55

No apparent relationship of a, with cone pressure, stress

level, moisture content, or material parameters could be
derived from the data. All our results are for recent alluvial deposits with similar material properties and geological
history, although distributed along the 1000-km eastern
coastline of South Africa.

724

C A N . GEOTECH. J . VOL. 30, 1993

Comparison of settlement records with the laboratory data

shows that conventional tests give similar but no better estimates of settlement than the piezocone method.
The secondary objective of our project is more relevant to
the authors' paper and concerns the estimation of coefficients of consolidation from piezocone tests.
The discussers anticipated that their project would inter alia
confirm the equation represented by the Jones and van Zyl
(1981) line shown in the authors' Fig. 5, viz.,
50
CPTU(1981)cV = t50

where
c, is coefficient of consolidation (m21year)
t,, is time for half dissipation (min).
It should be noted that the discussers' 1981 results specifically referred to c, deduced from t,,, not c,, and therefore
they are not in fact correctly represented in Fig. 5. The discussers' 1992 results are shown in Fig. 1 in the same form
as the authors' data and to do this we have assumed, based
on laboratory testing, that chlcV= 2 for our alluvial deposits.
Our 1992 results can be summarized as follows:
(1) The original 1981 equation is overconservative by a
factor of three and should be modified to

Correspondingly, if ch is required, then the above relationship

becomes
300
6 in cm Imin)
CPTU c, = (or t 5 ~

l50

Our data points to support this are shown in Fig. 1, and it can
be seen that a line representing the above equation is a good
fit for the data and it is practically coincident with the I, =
50 line. The laboratory tests show that I, for our normally
consolidated recent alluvial deposits is generally about 50.
(2) Our laboratory data are also shown in Fig. 1, and it can
be seen that this shows that the laboratory coefficients of
consolidation are between a half and one order of magnitude lower than the field back-analyzed coefficients of consolidation. We believe this is significant, since consolidation
times predicted directly and only by laboratory results may
lead to overconservative design decisions, e.g., installation
of subsoil drainage systems that in fact are not necessary, or
even of abandoning embankments in favour of structures.
We are delighted that the authors' data and ours are in
such close agreement. We conclude that the piezocone should
be practically mandatory for the estimation of coefficients of
consolidation and for this purpose we are strongly in favour
of the use of the u, filter position.