Study on monitoring and estimating soil physical properties using piezoceramic transducer

Soil mechanical properties play the most important role for the structural safety. But soil itself develops with environment as climate, loading and even surrounding biochemical contents which will strongly change the soil mechanical properties and may bring drastic damage to structural foundation. In-time monitoring and estimating on soil mechanical properties is proposed. Two piezoceramic transducers are embedded in predetermined locations: one is used as the actuator and the other is used as a sensor. The active-sensing method is applied to excite a stress wave propagating between the transducers. Variation of the wave velocity along the wave propagation path can be read while the soil properties changing. In this paper, soil specimens with different dry density, moisture content and soil granite ratio are tested to investigate the wave propagation variation through the soil with different properties. A model of shear wave velocity with different soil properties is established. Experimental results demonstrate that piezoelectric response wave may be potentially used to estimate soil physical properties.