Soil Compaction Concepts

  
 Why do we use the dry unit weight as a measure of how compacted a soil is?

• The associated cost of the compactive effort is determined per unit volume of the soil.
• This compactive effort, in the field is performed with the weight of the compaction equipment, number of blows of the hammers and other factors.
• The degree of compaction or how compacted a soil is determined by the dry unit weight of the soil, γ_d.
• The increase in dry unit weight gives good quality.

     Once the dry unit weight has reaches its criterion. It is easy to know the strength, compressibility, etc. Thus we use dry unit weight as a measure of how compacted a soil is.