Development and Application of Drainage Consolidation Device Used for New Type Triaxial Shear Test Samples

Triaxial shear test is one of the familiar laboratory tests in geotechnical engineering industry. The goal is primarily to obtain the shear strength index and changes of pore water pressure of soil. Shear strength indexes of total stress and effective stress could be obtained by consolidated undrained triaxial test (CU) and consolidated drained triaxial test (CD), so both of the tests have some special advantages not being replaced by other shear tests. However, the time spending on drainage consolidation during tests is too long to guarantee the progress, and consequently influences the schedule and economic benefits of the whole project. This paper presents a device which could be used to considerably reduce the drainage consolidation time of subs tan tial samples and describes its development method by analyzing mechanism of drainage consolidation process of triaxial shear specimen. Adopting this device, the efficiency of CU test and CD test could be increased 6~12 times and 3~6 times of the traditional one respectively. It could be used to significantly lower production cos ts; improve efficiency and obviously increase economic benefits.