Electrical Resistivity and Strength Analysis of Soil with Variation of Moisture Content

In general practice, soil investigation (SI) incorporating bore hole sampling will perhaps
produce the most reliable value of the relevant soil parameters for the purpose of actual
calculation on factor of safety (FOS) in slopes. however, bore hole sampling is in
general time consuming and very expensive. This project is a part of the whole research
which is to implement a quick method of establishing the factor of safety in slopes by
replacing the conventional soil parameters such as cohesion and angle of internal
friction with electrical parameters such as resistivity. hence, eliminating the need of the
more elaborate bore hole sampling which is very high in maintenance cost. This
research is fiocusing on finding the correlation between resistivity and some soil
parameters.
In this paper, a sandbox resistivity testing has been conducted for soil samples at two
difTerent locations and for each sample, the moisture content varies from 20%, 30% and
40%. It is an appropriate method mainly to collect the resistivity data in the laboratory,
and far analysis purposes. The experiments involved resistivity sandbox, moisture
content, particle size distribution and direct shear test. Direct shear tests were performed
for each sample in order to investigate the strength behavior of soil due to the various
amount of water content. Initial correlation is found and subjected to further testing firr
better findings