Influence of Particle Size Distribution and Moisture Content Variability on the Characterization of Soils in Ipinsa Area, Akure, Southwestern Nigeria

Abstract

Distribution of different sizes of grains has always been useful in estimating other soil properties which will in turn help to understand soil mechanical behavior. Besides, the study area contains soil mass with layering structure which are similar to those exhibited by sedimentary rocks. Hence, the conventional sieve-hydrometer grain size analytical method and another grain size-based classification scheme were employed to characterize soil deposits found within the area of study. Results from this study showed that majority of soil samples are fine-grained. Moreover, silt fractions were found to hold a positive correlation with the effective sizes (D10) while the same could not be said of the sand and clay fractions due to their negative correlations with D10. Data from this study resulted in the zoning of soil into two categories namely; the clayey sandy silts (csSI) and clayey silty sands (csiS). Conditions under which the soils were deposited were deduced from the Silt Fraction (SF) versus Percentage Fines (PF) plot. The plots revealed that majority of the soils within the study area were deposited under low energy and intermediate conditions. A relationship was found to occur between moisture contents in the soil and their resulting zoning. Soils in the silt zone (csSI) have a better overall water content than soils in the sand zone (csiS).