• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2009.03a
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• pp.349-360
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• 2009

The cone penetration test(CPT) has gained its popularity in site characterization indebted by its reliability, speed, economy, and automatic measurement system since its development in the 1930s. The CPT results, commonly consisting of cone tip resistance, sleeve friction, and pore water pressure measurements, allow us to classify soils as well as to reveal their engineering characteristics. The site condition at which the CPT is allowable is often dependent on the capacity of a CPT system. In Korea, it has been considered that the CPT could be appled only to soft soils in most cases because CPT systems available for stiff soils are very rare due to their expensive procurement and maintenance cost. Luoisiana Transportation Research Center(LTRC) has developed and implemented a field-rugged continuous intrusion miniature cone penetration test(CIMCPT) system since the late 1990s. The miniature cone penetrometer has a sectional cone area of $2cm^2$ allowing system capacity reduction compared to the standard $10cm^2$ cone penetrometer. The continuous intrusion mechanism allows fast and economic site investigation. Samsung Engineering & Construction has recently developed and implemented a similar CIMCPT system based on its original version developed in LTRC. The performance of the Samsung CIMCPT system has been investigated by calibration with the standard CPT system at a well-characterized test site in Pusan, Korea. In addition, scale effect between the miniature cone penetrometer and the standard cone penetrometer has been investigated by comparing the field test results using the both systems.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.429-438
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• 2018

Cone and T-bar penetrometers have been frequently used to estimate the undrained shear strength of clay. For small-size model tests, miniature penetrometers should be used but their correlation factors have not been well published. In this study, a testing setup was developed to derive empirical factors of the miniature cone and T-bar penetrometers. A 350mm-diameter chamber and kaolin clay were utilized to prepare soil specimens consolidated under four different pre-consolidation pressures controlling undrained shear strength. Two miniature cones with two diameters of 10-mm and 16-mm and a T-bar penetrometer with 10-mm diameter were used to investigate boundary effect, penetration rate effect, and diameter and shape effect. Unconsolidated-undrained triaxial tests were carried out with samples taken from the specimens to measure undrained shear strength. Finally, empirical factors for the penetrometers were constructed to correlate tip resistance to undrained shear strength.

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2010.09a
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• pp.269-281
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• 2010

The cone penetration test(CPT) has been increasingly used for in situ site characterization. However, the use of CPT is often limited due to specific site conditions depending on the cone size, geometry, and capacity of the CPT system used. In South Korea, it has generally been considered that the CPT could be satisfactorily performed only in soft soils. Louisiana State University/ Louisiana Transportation Research Center has implemented a field-rugged continuous intrusion miniature cone penetration test (CIMCPT) system since the 1990s. The miniature cone penetrometer of the CIMCPT system has a cross-sectional cone area of $2cm^2$ allowing finer soil profiles compared to the standard $10cm^2$. The reduced cross-sectional area also enables a system capacity reduction leading to cost saving and ease in maintenance. In addition, the continuous intrusion mechanism allows fast and economic site investigations. Samsung C&T Corporation has recently implemented a similar CIMCPT system. In this study, case studies on the field application of Samsung CIMCPT system for the last 2 years are presented to illustrate its performance investigation and its usefulness and limitation. Results of the case studies show that the CIMCPT system can be applied to soils with cone tip resistance($q_c$) values up to about 30MPa and allows a reliable and useful way to characterize soft soils. The results also show that the rod buckling limits the investigation depth by the system and the large contact pressure of the CIMCPT truck prevents the use of the system at sites with soft surface soils. According to the results of the case studies, the Samsung CIMCPT system has been being upgraded with a miniature cone with a longer rod, a crawler-type transportation system, a pre-boring system, and so on.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.77-86
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• 2008

The disturbance zone and measured values are affected by the size of the penetrometer. The local value may be measured by the smaller penetrometer. An ultra small Micro-Cone penetrometer (5mm in outer diameter) is designed and manufactured to characterize soil properties with minimum disturbance during penetration tests. The tip resistance is measured by using stain gauges attached near the Micro-Cone. In addition, the friction sleeve is adopted to effectively remove the skin friction from the tip resistance. Design concern includes the installation of stain gauges, circuits, penetration systems, penetration rate, sampling rate, operating temperature, and calibration. Application tests show that the clay interface, and the soil layers consisting of clay and sand are clearly detected by the Micro-Cone. Furthermore, the cone tip resistances measured by the Micro-Cone and the miniature cone (16mm in outer diameter) are similar. Note the resolution is much higher in the Micro-Cone. This study shows that the Micro-Cone may effectively detect the soil interface with high resolution, and with minimum disturbance.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.2359-2368
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• 2013

Cone penetration tests (CPTs) have been increasingly used for site characterizations. However, the site investigations using CPTs are often limited due to soil conditions depending on the cone size and capacity of the CPT system. The small sectional area of a miniature cone improves the applicability of the CPT system due to the increased capacity of the CPT system. A continuous intrusion system using a coiled rod allows fast and cost effective site investigation. In this study, the performance of the continuous intrusion miniature cone penetration test (CIMCPT) system has been evaluated by comparison tests with the standard CPT system at several construction sites in Korea. The results show that the CIMCPT system has a same performance with the CPT system and has advantages on the mobility and applicability. According to field verification tests for scale effect evaluation, the cone tip resistance evaluated by CIMCPT overestimates by 10% comparing to standard CPTs. A crawler mounted with the CIMCPT system has been implemented to improve accessibility to soft ground, and has shown improvement over the truck type CIMCPT system. Therefore, the improved CIMCPT system can be utilized as a cost effective and highly reliable soil investigation methodology to detect the depth of soft ground and to evaluate soil classification.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.31 no.1C
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• pp.19-27
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• 2011

This paper evaluates the applicability of wave-based nondestructive methodologies and a penetration test for compaction quality measurements during road construction. To evaluate the physical and mechanical properties of compacted subgrade soil layers, soil stiffness gauge (SSG), time domain reflectometry (TDR), and miniature electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers were used to nondestructively evaluate the soil response during and after compaction and dynamic cone penetrometer (DCP) profiles were used to evaluate the soil shear strength after compaction was completed. At the field site, two types of soils were compacted with four different compaction equipments and energies. Field testing results indicate that soil parameters evaluated by different testing methods, which are SSG, TDR, MEMS accelerometer, and DCP, are highly correlated. In addition, it is shown that the physical and mechanical tests deployed in this study can be used as alternative methods to the conventional compaction quality evaluation methods when assessing the overall quality and the engineering response of compacted lifts.