To characterize the role of specimen disturbance and structure in the hydromechanical behavior of collapsible soils, two sets of wetting-induced collapse and suction-controlled triaxial tests were conducted on intact and reconstituted specimens of a loessial soil taken from a loess deposit in Gorgan, a city in the northeastern Golestan province of Iran. The testing approach used an advanced triaxial testing device that was specifically modified to control pressures applied to a soil specimen and to monitor and measure the amount of changes in volume and water content of the soil specimens during testing using highly sensitive digital sensors with an accuracy of ±0.01 cm³. Results of the wetting-induced collapse tests show that the collapse phenomenon in intact loessial specimens was mostly a stepwise reduction in volume rather than a continuous decrease with a constant rate or a sudden drop in volume as water entered the voids. This behavior is believed to be attributed to the nonhomogenous distribution of macropores or micropores in intact specimens, which results in the presence of void spaces with different degrees of collapse potential within the soil matrix. A comparison of the experimental measurements during wetting-induced collapse also indicated that soil structure has negligible effects on the behavior of collapsible soils at high values of mean net stress (i.e., 200 kPa or higher) but significantly influences the behavior under low mean net stresses (i.e., 50 kPa or lower). The shear strength values of reconstituted specimens were higher than those of intact specimens when sheared at the same applied mean net stresses and matric suctions. Observations from this study suggest that the use of a critical-state line generated based on reconstituted specimens is not suitable for the characterization of the behavior of natural loessial soils. Finally, the disturbed-state concept (DSC) was used to characterize the stress-strain behavior of the intact and reconstituted specimens of collapsible soils during shear.

Unsaturated loessial Aeolian deposits tend to experience significant volumetric compression when subjected to loading. This behavior is generally attributed to their open, unstable soil fabric and their weak inter-particle bonding forces, which together yield a soil void structure that is susceptible to collapse. The current study examines two possible mechanisms of pore collapse in a loessial soil: pore collapse induced by an increase in net confining stresses under constant matric suction conditions, such as what occurs when a new structure is constructed on top of a collapsible soil deposit, and pore collapse induced by a change in matric suction conditions under a constant net confining stress, such as what occurs when a collapsible soil deposit beneath an existing structure experiences significant wetting due to a large precipitation event. To accomplish this task, an innovative test approach was used to assess the hydro-mechanical behavior of a highly collapsible loessial soil. The test setup incorporates a set of electronic pressure regulators coupled with three electronic pressure sensors to measure and control the applied pressures, and two high-precision digital volume change measuring devices to measure changes in the volume of the specimen and its degree of saturation. Using this approach, “undisturbed” loess specimens are subjected to either isotropic compression at a constant matric suction, or wetting-induced collapse at a constant mean net stress. Results indicate that the hydro-mechanical behavior of collapsible soils is considerably stress-path dependent. For the same values of mean net stress, the deformation measurements of specimens subjected to isotropic compression were often larger than those subjected to wetting-induced collapse. For the isotropic compression tests, it was shown that the soil water retention curve of the soil depends on the mean net stress. Less sensitivity to the mean net stress was observed for specimens subjected to wetting-induced collapse.