Geostatistical Variation and Correlation of Strengths and Index Properties of Coastal Field Soils Using Data Analytics

Geotechnical properties of clayey soils are not only influenced by the chemical composition of clay, but also the geological formation. Construction of coastal transportation infrastructure (highways, bridges, rails, and harbors), shallow and deep foundations for the super structures, and buried structures including tunnels and pipelines require detailed investigation and information of the geotechnical properties of the soils. This study is focused on the geostatistical analyses of the strength and index properties of a deltaic clayey soil based on 1,070 bore-hole data collected up to a depth of 23 m and covering an area of over 25,000 m2. Also, marine clay data collected from around the world were analyzed. For the deltaic clay soils, based on the statistical analyses of over 3,700 liquid limit data and 3,700 plastic limit data, the statistical distribution was lognormal with positive skewness. The statistical distribution of the undrained shear strength for the CH and CL deltaic soils was lognormal. The liquid limit range and plastic limit range for the marine CH soils were much higher than the deltaic CH soils. In addition, geotechnical property correlations between undrained shear strength and index properties were investigated based on over 1,180 data of deltaic clay soils. In this study, a total of over 12,500 data were used.