Some generic trends on the basic engineering properties of fine-grained soils

The factors influencing the engineering properties of fine-grained soils are the consistency limits, defined as primary properties, and water content, density and soil structure defined as secondary properties. This paper considers over 1000 data from the literature and laboratory tests where the plasticity ratio of clays (R-p), defined as the ratio of plastic limit to liquid limit, was tentatively correlated to the specific surface area (SSA), clay fraction of clays, and the liquidity index (LI). R-p was also used to interpret the Casagrande plasticity chart. R-p decreases for increasing modified SSA, whereas the correlation with the clay fractionis less pronounced. R-p is linked with the LI within a range of 0.2-0.8. Results show, therefore, that physical properties of clays are extremely variable and a unique relation among the properties is extremely difficult to obtain. The goal of this paper is to provide a general overview about the intercorrelation among the engineeringproperties of clays.