A Critical Assessment of the Moist Tamping Technique

Current field sampling techniques are not readily able to produce high-quality undisturbed granular soil specimens for laboratory testing at an affordable cost. Accordingly, numerous specimen reconstitution methods have been developed for use in the laboratory. Among these methods, moist tamping has the advantage that it is relatively easy to control the global specimen density achieved, even for loose specimens, although unfortunately the method has also been qualitatively shown to yield less uniform specimens. This paper describes the findings of a study that critically assessed the moist tamping method by measuring the forces applied during the tamping process and investigated the uniformity of specimens prepared with the method by quantitatively analyzing both X-ray and optical images.