Cracked Soils Behavior Due to Drying Conditions Using a Fuzzy C-Means Method

Abstract

The drying cycle can affect embankments based ontheir physical properties and induce soil cracks. This paper investigates the unsaturated physical behavior of material from flood embankments located at the Bengawan Solo River, Pelangwot village, Bojonegoro, East Java, Indonesia. The volumetric shrinkage and degree of compactedness of the soil are important factors that control the soil behavior due to dry conditions. Some tests were conducted to study the desiccation process, in which soil samples were placed in a circular desiccation plate with soil thickness of 10 mm and a 100 mm plate diameter. A water retention curve was obtained to analyze the material properties during shrinkage. Next, the effect of the drying process on geometric characteristics of crack patterns was analyzed by image processing. Then, photo records of cracked soil from laboratory tests were assessed to determine the soil crack intensity via a Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) method using MATLAB software. The image analysis results show that the geometric characteristics of crack patterns were influenced by the drying process with a decrease in water content at 10% intervals until the air-dried condition was achieved. This is consistent with field observations; this indicates that image processing can be used quantitatively to analyze the drying process dependency of soil cracking behavior.