When the depth of stressed soil is rather small, Plate Load Test (PLT) becomes the most efficient test to estimate the soil properties for design purposes. Among these properties, modulus of subgrade reaction is the most important one that usually employed in roads and concrete pavement design. Two methods are available to perform PLT: static and dynamic methods. Static PLT is usually adopted due to its simplicity and time saving to be performs in comparison with cyclic (dynamic) method. The two methods are described in ASTM standard.

In this paper the effect of the test method used in PLT in estimation of some mechanical soil properties was distinguished via a series of both test methods applied in a same site. The comparison of

    The current experiment was conducted to explore the effect of soil crude oil ( crude oil ) pollution on some wood properties of   Casuarina equisetifolia.      Four levels of pollution were applied on 40 (one-year) old seedlings . Measurements were taken by cutting the trees after two growth seasons from date of pollution .The studied Properties were fiber length, diameter, wall thickness, and specific gravity of external and internal wood.  Results showed an adverse effect of pollution on fiber diameter more than on fiber length. While wall thickness did not affect.  Fiber dimensions of external wood showed higher values  than that of internal one, especially for fiber

A simple technique is proposed in this paper for estimating the coefficient of permeability of an unsaturated soil based on physical properties of soils that include grain size analysis, degree of saturation or water content, and porosity of the soil. The proposed method requires the soil-water characteristic curve for the prediction of the coefficient of permeability as most of the conventional methods. A procedure is proposed to define the hydraulic conductivity function from the soil water characteristic curve which is measured by the filter paper method. Fitting methods are applied through the program (SoilVision), after indentifying the basic properties of the soil such as Attereberg limits, specific gravity, void ratio, porosity, d

Gypseous soils are widely distributed and especially in Iraq where arid area of hot climatic is present. These soils are considered as problematic soils; therefore this work attends to improve the geotechnical properties of such soil and reduce the dangers of collapse due to wetting process. In this research, undisturbed soil sample of 30 % gypsum content from Karbala city is used. The Single Oedometer collapse test is used in order to investigate the collapse characteristics of natural soil and after treatment with 3%, 6%, 9%, 12% and 15% of Cutback Asphalt. Moreover, two selected additive percentages (9% and 12%) are used to evaluate the suitability of using the Cutback Asphalt for improvement of the bearing capacity o

The planning, designing, construction of excavations and foundations in soft to very soft clay soils are always difficult. They are problematic soil that caused trouble for the structures built on them because of the low shear strength, high water content, and high compressibility. This work investigates the geotechnical behavior of soft clay by using tyre ash material burnt in air. The investigation contains the following tests: physical tests, chemical tests, consolidation test, Compaction tests, shear test, California Bearing Ratio test CBR, and model tests. These tests were done on soil samples prepared from soft clay soil; tyre ash was used in four percentages (2, 4, 6, and 8%). The results of the tests were; The soil samples which

Shallow foundations have been commonly used to transfer load to soil layer within the permissible limits of settlement based on the bearing capacity of the soil. For most practical cases, the shape of the shallow foundation is of slight significance. Also, friction resistance forces in the first layers of soils are negligible due to non-sufficient surrounding surface area and compaction conditions. However, the bearing capacity of a shallow foundation can be increased by several techniques. Geocell is one of the geosynthetic tool applied mainly to reinforce soil. This study presents a numerical approach of honeycombed geocell steel panels reinforcing the sandy soil under shallow foundation, and several parameters are investigated such as th

       The present study was performed to spotlight the potential role of soil bacteria in the Al-Rumaila oil field as a bioindicator of heavy metals pollution. For this purpose, nine soil samples were collected from different sites, with 20cm depth, to assess the pollution status depending on the total and available concentrations of heavy metals.  The result indicates pollution of the studied soils with the following metals: Cd, Cu, Fe, Zn, and Pb. The mean of total concentration for all studied metals was higher than the allowed maximum limit based on the international limit:(3.394, 3.994, 39.993, 8844.979,150.372, and 103.347 µg/g), respectively. While measuring the total Metal concentration is important in determining the de