• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.145-156
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• 2024

The mechanical properties of the concrete-frozen soil interface play a significant role in the stability and service performance of construction projects in cold regions. Current research mainly focuses on the precast concrete-frozen soil interface, with limited consideration for the more realistic cast-in-place concrete-frozen soil interface. The two construction methods result in completely different contact surface morphologies and exhibit significant differences in mechanical properties. Therefore, this study selects silty clay as the research object and conducts direct shear tests on the concrete-frozen soil interface under conditions of initial water content ranging from 12% to 24%, normal stress from 50 kPa to 300 kPa, and freezing temperature of -3℃. The results indicate that (1) both interface shear stress-displacement curves can be divided into three stages: rapid growth of shear stress, softening of shear stress after peak, and residual stability; (2) the peak strength of both interfaces increases initially and then decreases with an increase in water content, while residual strength is relatively less affected by water content; (3) peak strength and residual strength are linearly positively correlated with normal stress, and the strength of ice bonding is less affected by normal stress; (4) the mechanical properties of the cast-in-place concrete-frozen soil interface are significantly better than those of the precast concrete-frozen soil interface. However, when the water content is high, the former's mechanical performance deteriorates much more than the latter, leading to severe strength loss. Therefore, in practical engineering, cast-in-place concrete construction is preferred in cases of higher negative temperatures and lower water content, while precast concrete construction is considered in cases of lower negative temperatures and higher water content. This study provides reference for the construction of frozen soil-structure interface in cold regions and basic data support for improving the stability and service performance of cold region engineering.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.211-221
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• 2017

A laboratory investigation into crude oil contaminated sand-concrete interface behavior is performed. The interface tests were carried out through a direct shear apparatus. Pure sand and sand-bentonite mixture with different crude oil contents and three concrete surfaces of different textures (smooth, semi-rough, and rough) were examined. The experimental results showed that the concrete surface texture is an effective factor in soil-concrete interface shear strength. The interface shear strength of the rough concrete surface was found higher than smooth and semi-rough concrete surfaces. In addition to the texture, the normal stress and the crude oil content also play important roles in interface shear strength. Moreover, the friction angle decreases with increasing crude oil content due to increase of oil concentration in soil and it increases with increasing interface roughness.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.361-372
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• 2016

The soil-concrete interface shear strength, although has been extensively studied, is still difficult to predict as a result of the dependence on many factors such as normal stresses, surface roughness, particle sizes, moisture contents, dilation angles of soils, etc. In this study, a well-known rigorous statistical learning approach, namely the least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) realized in a ubiquitous spreadsheet platform is firstly used in estimating the soil-structure interface shear strength. Instead of studying the complicated mechanism, LS-SVM enables to explore the possible link between the fundamental factors and the interface shear strengths, via a sophisticated statistic approach. As a preliminary investigation, the authors study the expansive soils that are found extensively in most countries. To reduce the complexity, three major influential factors, e.g., initial moisture contents, initial dry densities and normal stresses of soils are taken into account in developing the LS-SVM models for the soil-concrete interface shear strengths. The predicted results by LS-SVM show reasonably good agreement with experimental data from direct shear tests.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.81-90
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• 2019

The shear behavior of soil-concrete interface is mainly affected by the surface roughness of the two contact surfaces. The present research emphasizes on investigating the effect of roughness of soil-concrete interface on the interface shear behavior in two-layered laboratory testing samples. In these specially prepared samples, clay silt layer with density of $2027kg/m^3$ was selected to be in contact a concrete layer for simplifying the laboratory testing. The particle size testing and direct shear tests are performed to determine the appropriate particles sizes and their shear strength properties such as cohesion and friction angle. Then, the surface undulations in form of teeth are provided on the surfaces of both concrete and soil layers in different testing carried out on these mixed specimens. The soil-concrete samples are prepared in form of cubes of 10*10*30 cm. in dimension. The undulations (inter-surface roughness) are provided in form of one tooth or two teeth having angles $15^{\circ}$ and $30^{\circ}$, respectively. Several direct shear tests were carried out under four different normal loads of 80, 150, 300 and 500 KPa with a constant displacement rate of 0.02 mm/min. These testing results show that the shear failure mechanism is affected by the tooth number, the roughness angle and the applied normal stress on the sample. The teeth are sheared from the base under low normal load while the oblique cracks may lead to a failure under a higher normal load. As the number of teeth increase the shear strength of the sample also increases. When the tooth roughness angle increases a wider portion of the tooth base will be failed which means the shear strength of the sample is increased.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.299-312
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• 2020

The aim of this paper was to investigating the effects of soil relative density, construction materials roughness, oil type (gasoil, crude oil, and used motor oil), and oil content on the internal and interface shear behavior of sand with different construction materials by means of a modified large direct shear test apparatus. Tests conducted on the soil-soil (S-S), soil-rough concrete (S-RC), soil-smooth concrete (S-SC), and soil-steel (S-ST) interfaces and results showed that the shear strength of S-S interface is always higher than the soil-material interfaces. Internal and interface friction angles of sand beds increased by increase in relative density and decreased by increasing oil content. The oil properties (especially viscosity) played a major role in interface friction behavior. Despite the friction angles of contaminated sands with viscous fluids drastically decreased, it compensated by the apparent cohesion and adhesion developed between the soil grains and construction materials.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.86 no.5
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• pp.663-671
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• 2023

Freeze-thaw cycles induce strength loss at the frozen soil-concrete interface and deterioration of bonding, which causes construction engineering problems. To clarify the deterioration characteristics of the interface under the freeze-thaw cycle, a frozen soil-concrete sample was used as the research object, an interface scanning electron microscope test under the freeze-thaw cycle was carried out to identify the micro index information, and an interface shear test was carried out to explore the loss law of interface shear strength under the freeze-thaw cycle. The results showed that the integrity of the interface was destroyed, and the pore number and pore size of the interface increased significantly with the number of freeze-thaw cycles. The connection form gradually deteriorates from surface-to-surface contact to point-to-surface contact and point-to-point contact, and the interfacial shear strength decreases the most at 0-3 freeze-thaw cycles, with small decreases from to 3-8 cycles. After 12 freeze-thaw cycles, the interfacial shear strength tends to be stable, and shear the failure occurs internally in the soil.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.281-290
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• 2022

The direct shear test is commonly used to evaluate the shear behavior of frozen soil-structure interfaces under normal stress. However, failure criteria, such as the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion, are needed to obtain the unconfined shear strength. Hence, the punch shear test, which is usually used to estimate the shear strength of rocks without confinement, was examined in this study to directly determine the adfreezing strength. It is measured as the shear strength of the frozen soil-structure interface under unconfined conditions. Different soils of silica sand, field sand, and field clay were prepared inside the steel and concrete ring structures. Soil and ring structures were frozen at the target temperature for more than 24 h. A punch shear test was then conducted. The test results show that the adfreezing strength increased with a decrease in the target temperature and increase in the initial water content, owing to the increase in ice content. The adfreezing strength of field clay was the smallest when compared with the other soil specimens because of the large amount of unfrozen water content. The field sand with the larger normalized roughness showed greater adfreezing strength than the silica sand with a lower normalized roughness. From the experiment and analysis, the applicability of the punch shear test was examined to measure the adfreezing strength of the frozen soil-structure interface. To find a proper sample dimension, supplementary experiments or numerical analysis will be needed in further research.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.5-17
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• 2022

A pile is a type of medium for constructing superstructures in weak geotechnical conditions. A pretensioned spun high-strength concrete (PHC) pile is composed of high-strength concrete with a specified strength greater than 80 MPa. Therefore, it has advantages in resistance to axial and bending moments and quality control and management since it is manufactured in a factory. However, the skin friction of a pile, which accounts for a large portion of the pile bearing capacity, is only approximated using empirical equations or standard penetration test (SPT) N-values. Particularly, there are some poor research results on the pile-soil interface under the seismic loads in Korea. Additionally, some studies do not consider geoenvironmental elements, such as groundwater pH values. This study performs sets of cyclic simple shear tests using submerged concrete specimens for 1 month to consider pH values of groundwater and clay specimens composed of kaolinite to generate a pile-soil interface. 0.2 and 0.4 MPa of normal stress conditions are considered in the case of pH values. The disturbed state concept is employed to express the dynamic behavior of the interface, and the disturbed function parameters are newly suggested. Consequently, the largest disturbance increase under basic conditions is observed, and an early approach to the failure under low normal stress conditions is presented. The disturbance function parameters are also suggested to express this disposition quantitatively.

• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2010

To understand the deformation behavior of nonwoven geotextiles(NWGT) reinforced soil wall, analyses of load-elongation properties, soil-reinforcement interface friction, laboratory model tests, and field cases throughout literature reviews are being studied in this paper. According to the analyses results, the stiffness and tensile strength of NWGT is increased in proportion to confinement pressures, and the interface shear strength at soil-NWGT appeared to be stronger than soil-geogrid interface. The deformation at the beginning of loading on NWGT reinforced soil wall is larger than geogrid reinforced soil wall, but the wall deformation with NWGT is smaller than the wall of geogrid after passing some loading point in laboratory model tests. Case analysis results have shown that the facing of NWGT reinforced soil wall should be rigid enough to be used as a permanent wall, and NWGT and in-situ poor soil can be used for reinforcement and backfill respectively if the wall is constructed as pre-reinforced soil body and with post-facing that has a full-height rigid concrete.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.5-17
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• 2021

In this study, the shear behavior between pile-sandy soil interface was quantified based on series of rigorous ring shear test results. Ring shearing test was carried out to observe the shear behavior prior to failure and behavior at residual state between most commonly used pile materials - steel and concrete - and Jumunjin sand. The test was set to clarify the shear behavior under various confinement conditions and soil densities. The test results were converted in to representative friction angles for various test materials. Additional numerical analysis was executed to validate the accuracy of the test results. Based on the test results and the numerical validation, it was found that due to the dilative and contractive nature of sand, its interface behavior can be categorized in to two different types : soils with higher densities tend to show peak shear stress and moves on to residual state, while on the other hand, soils with lower densities tend to show bilinear load-transfer curves along the interface. However, the relative density and the confining stress was found to affect the friction angle only in the small train range, and converges as it progresses to large deformation. This study established a large deformation analysis method which can successfully simulate and predict the large deformation behavior such as ring shear tests. Moreover, the friction angle derived from the ring shear test result and verified by numerical analysis can be applied to numerical analysis and actual design of various pile foundations.