Soil Suction Dispersion and Statistical Analysis with Depth at the Medford Airport

The use of soil suction measurements has steadily increased in geotechnical practice. A current standard test procedure that describes the use of laboratory filter papers as passive sensors to measure the soil matric and total suction is ASTM D5298-94. The principal objective of the research presented here was to evaluate dispersion of suction measurements with depth using the filter paper method described in the ASTM standard. In a single test boring to a depth of 5.33 m, 35 samples were taken at intervals of 152.4 mm. Each sample was separated into four replicate samples. The matric and total suction of each of the 35 sample intervals were then measured, resulting in a total of 278 suction measurements. To manage this volume of tests, the sample size was split approximately in half, and each portion was separately tested. This approach led to severall insights into the test procedure, such as the effect of delay in transferring the filter paper from the specimen container into the metal container. Sampling and testing are described. The dispersion of both the total and the matric suction measurements was characterized in three ways: the range of measurements in each sample interval, the standard deviation of measurements in each sample interval, and an error function defined as the difference between each measurement and the mean for the sample interval. Each of these statistics was plotted as a histogram. A chi-squared test was applied to measure the goodness-of-fit of a t-distribution fitted to the error as defined by the difference between each measurement and the mean for that sample interval. Results indicate precision for total and matric suction measurements of 0.0540 log kPa within one standard deviation. Analysis does not indicate a substantial difference between the error associated with total suction measurements and that associated with matric suction measurements. A brief description of the conventional geotechnical site characterization is presented for the Medford Airport.