1.

Dilatant Sand

Many people have noticed how wet sand seems to "dry out" beneath their footsteps, but few
stop to think about what is happening. Many of my geology students at first tell me that my foot
has somehow 'pushed the water away', but upon consideration they realize that I can't push the
water any further than the edge of my shoe! When shear forces are applied to these 'dilatant
sands', the individual grains slide up upon one another in such a way as to increase the porosity
of the sand around your foot. The previously saturated sand now appears drier! When you lift
your foot, the sand grains immediately relax (or settle) into a more compact alignment, and the
sand instantly appears to be wet again. If you leave your foot in place for while, water will
gradually seep in from the perimeter of the 'dry spot' to saturate the newly created pore spaces.
Lifting your foot then will actually leave a pool of water where your foot was just previously
positioned! Other materials, notably cornstarch and water, illustrate the dilatant property well,
and in industrial settings handling dilatant fluids presents interesting problems.

2.Stressdilatancy in very loose sand

Virtually all investigation of liquefaction has used undrained tests, and it has become common to
represent the undrained strength in terms of a collapse surface or collapse stress ratio described
by an effective friction angle. A difficulty with undrained tests is that they only allow observation
of the interaction of elastic and plastic strain because of the imposed boundary condition (i.e., no
drainage or zero volume change), precluding a proper understanding of an effective stress
criterion for maximum undrained strength. Drained triaxial tests do not suffer from this
shortcoming, and stressdilatancy of dense sands in drained shear is well established as a
fundamental aspect of sand behaviour, based on micromechanical considerations. It is
particularly interesting to consider the stressdilatancy behaviour of very loose sands in the
context of soil liquefaction. Although there are some data in the literature on loose sand
behaviour in drained triaxial compression, the majority of data are actually for sands markedly
denser than sands showing static liquefaction in undrained tests. This paper therefore reports
some laboratory testing of very loose sands, together with comparative undrained liquefaction
data, and compares the loose behaviour to that of dense sand. These data are reduced to
stressdilatancy form so that the fundamental aspects of loose soil behaviour can be seen and
compared to flow rules used in constitutive models. The stressdilatancy of very loose sand
shows no limiting stress ratio markedly less than that of the critical state. Moreover, the
stressdilatancy trends of very loose sand are the same as those of dense sand. There is no
evidence of "structural collapse" of the particulate arrangement of very loose sands, contrary to
speculation associated with collapse surfaces in the literature. Explanations of sand liquefaction
must seek other physical explanations of the soil behaviour.Key words: sand, constitutive
relations, plasticity, liquefaction.