Settlement Characteristic of Beach Sands and Its Evaluation

Compression characteristics in sands under working load are an important design consideration because they are directly related to settlement response. The compressibility of sand materials is significantly dependent on soil characteristics. Sands distributed in Jeju island's coastal areas, Korea, were derived from volcanic rock or from shells. Compression tests were conducted to assess the compression characteristics of these sands. From the test results, each sand showed different behaviors due to its composition origin. The measured settlement of Jeju harbor area shows that in addition to the initial elastic compression, a considerable additional compression occurred with time. The prediction with the oedometer compression test method was well matched with the measured data. However, the empirical methods (based on elastic approach) predicted a smaller than that actually occurred because they did not consider the crushing, shattering, and rearrangement of particles, which were real phenomena in sandy soils under loading condition. Based on these studies, we recommend that the settlement of Jeju coastal area sandy soils should be estimated by conducting compression tests.