Correlation Between Miniature Cone Tip Resistance and Shear Strength Parameters of Clean and Silty Sand Using a Conventional Triaxial Setup

The ultimate tip resistance of the cone was determined by employing a miniature cone penetrometer of diameter 19.5 mm in conventional triaxial equipment. A number of penetration tests were carried out for clean and silty sands. The variation of the tip resistance was determined with respect to changes in effective vertical stress (σ_v). It was seen that with this laboratory experimental setup, it is possible to make a reasonable prediction of the ultimate cone tip resistance (q_cu). As expected, the tip resistance increases with an increase in (σ_v). For the same range of the relative density, an increase in proportion of silt was found to generally cause a reduction in the tip resistance. By considering the effect of the overburden stress on internal friction angle of soil mass, it was noted that the magnitude of q_cu/σ_v increases almost linearly with friction angle. The obtained values of q_cu compare reasonably well with two different widely used correlations in literature. It is expected that the study will be useful for deriving correlations between shear strength parameters and the cone tip resistance for cohesionless deposits at different values of the effective overburden pressure especially for loose to medium dense states.