Estimation of Hydraulic Conductivity of Soils Based on Biot’s Theory of Wave Propagation

This study presents an acoustic technique to estimate the hydraulic conductivity of soils. Acoustic attenuation and propagation velocity spectra were measured for dry and saturated sandy specimens to confirm that the relationship between Biot’s characteristic frequency and its associated hydraulic conductivity exists only for saturated soils. From the experiments presented in this paper, both attenuation-based and propagation-velocity-based techniques resulted in almost identical characteristic frequencies for saturated soils. The propagation velocity based measurements, however, show a slightly clearer trend compared to the attenuation based measurements. The results also show that the acoustically estimated hydraulic conductivities of soils agree well with constant head laboratory test results, demonstrating that this acoustic technique can be a useful nondestructive tool to estimate the hydraulic conductivity of sandy or silty soils.