Assessment of soil compaction properties: A review

Laboratory determination of the compaction properties of soils is important for use in geotechnical structures. Since compaction properties are normally determined by conducting either standard proctor or modified proctor tests that are laborious and time-consuming, it is useful to review the existing literature where maximum unit weight and optimum moisture content values could be reliably correlated with the indices of soil. This paper reviews literature relating to the soil properties that control the compaction characteristics and introduces some efforts to predict the compaction properties of soils using the index test results. This review was assembled from the existing literature to make an available convenient introduction to this subject, which is of interest to engineers in many diverse fields of civil engineering. From the results of many previous studies, it was proven that, with different and acceptable degrees of confidence levels these properties were proven to be successfully used in estimating of the compaction parameters.