Behaviour of Electrical Resistivity and Seismic Correlated with Heterogeneous Soil Strength Parameters

The soil strength parameters which can be obtained from site investigation are increasingly essential in geotechnical engineering in order to understand the soil stability to sustain the load of building or structure. The conventional soil investigation incorporates borehole sampling which is reliable but is time consuming and costly. Besides, this method is invasive and requires high density sampling for accurate assessment for high spatial variation of soil properties. As an alternative, in this study, geophysical methods, namely seismic surface wave and electrical resistivity survey are utilized to estimate the soil strength parameters. The objective of this study is to establish a correlation between the seismic and electrical resistivity values with the soil strength properties obtained from standard penetration test (SPT) and laboratory tests for soil samples obtained in tropical environment with heterogeneous soil. Both seismic behaviour and electrical resistivity values are studied in laboratory test and field surveys.