Compressibility according to compacted soil suction

Compacted soils are widely used in geotechnical engineering. To ensure the stability of the structures involving compacted soils, it is essential to well understand the volume change behavior which depends on unsaturated soil mechanical parameters which are highly variable both in time and space because they depend on soil structure and soil hydrous state. In this paper we carried out oedometric compression tests with a control of soil suction by an osmotic method to study the compressibility of a compacted loamy soil in North France for re-wetted samples with soil powder sieved at 2 mm, with an initial density of 1.1 Mg m^-3 under the combined mechanical (vertical stress) and hydrous (suction) effects. The results show that the compression index λ varies little with suction in the range 10-200 kPafor the compacted soil.