Investigation of moisture effect on tensile strength in granular soil

A direct tension apparatus and experimental procedures were developed. This technique requires no power or sophisticated data acquisition, and it is able to simply measure the tensile strengths of moist sands and should make it possible for engineers wishing to include tensile strength in their soil behavior models to do so in a coherent way, linking model parameters to laboratory data. Experiments were carried out to examine the variation of tensile strengths on sands at different water content levels up to 18%. The magnitudes of the tensile strengths at even very low moisture contents are not equal to zero, as is widely assumed, Tensile strength increases with increasing water contents until about 15% and beyond this point the strength decreases. The influences of relative density and fines on the tensile strength are observed, but substantially dependent on the water content.