Intrinsic compression behavior of remolded sand–clay mixture

A series of incremental loading oedometer tests was conducted on pure clays and sand–clay mixtures with various sand/clay ratios and clay mineral compositions. The void indexes Iv and IvH were introduced to evaluate their intrinsic compressibility. Test results revealed that Iv was more suitable for depicting the compression behavior of pure clays than IvH; whereas, for the compressibility of sand–clay mixtures, the normalized compression line by using Iv was obviously different from that of pure clays and traditional soils due to the presence of sand particles. Therefore, a four-phase analysis framework of sand–clay mixtures was introduced to unify the intrinsic compression behavior of soils with and without sands. It was found that the updated clay void index Ivc parameter was effective to unify the soil’s compression behavior by excluding the influence of sand particles in clays before the sand skeleton formation. After the formation of the sand skeleton, the cluster particles change the stress distrib...