Miniature Centrifuge Modeling for Conventional Consolidation Test

Abstract Consolidation parameters are usually determined in the laboratory with oedometer tests in earth gravity conditions (1 g). However, performing the test is very time-consuming. Although dynamic approaches in which higher accelerations are applied have been developed as an alternative to the static approaches to reduce the duration of consolidation tests, these methods are expensive and require huge centrifuges. Moreover, the focus for these centrifuges is more on research than on practical applications. This study discusses the applicability of a small-sized centrifuge device in consolidation tests. The particular device developed for this study is a very small centrifuge compared to other examples around the world. The results revealed that employing this device in the tests reduced test duration to a couple of hours. Identical soil samples with a zero disturbance were prepared in the laboratory and used in the experiments. A new parameter, equivalent centrifuge load (Wce), was defined to correlate the results from the proposed approach with the conventional consolidation-test results. An empirical relationship was developed to transform the axial strain (ϵ)–equivalent centrifuge load (Wce) dataset obtained from the centrifuge tests to ϵ–effective stress (σ′) data pairs. The empirical relationship could predict the virgin compression line with a high level of accuracy while it predicts the preconsolidation stress (σ′p) with moderate accuracy. These relationships were applied to natural soil samples, and the findings are very promising.