• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.23 no.9
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• pp.29-37
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• 2007

The experiments have been conducted on Kaolinite in laboratory to investigate the development of shrinkage cracking and propose a simple model. Image analysis method consisting of control point selection(CPS) technique is used to process and analyze images of soil cracking captured by a digital camera. The distributions of crack length increment and crack area increment vary as a three-step process. These steps are regarded as stages of soil cracking. They are in turn primary crack, secondary crack and shrinkage crack stages. In case of crack area, the primary and secondary stages end at normalized gravimetric water content(NGWC) of 0.92 and 0.70 for different specimen thicknesses respectively. In addition, the primary stage in case of crack length also ends at NGWC of 0.92 while the secondary stage stops at NGWC of 0.79, 0.82, and 0.85 for the sample thicknesses of 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0 cm respectively Based on the experimental results, the distributions of crack length increment and crack area increment appear to be linear with a decrease of NGWC. Therefore, the development of shrinkage cracking is proposed typically by a simple model functioned by a combination of three linear expressions.