Study of Anisotropic permeability of Coarse-grained soils using experimental model and x-ray diffraction analysis

Permeability is one of the most important physical properties of soil used in water engineering science. In order to carry out this research, we designed and tested a device for measuring the horizontal and vertical permeability in a sample with coarsegrained particles.

In the present study, four uniform soil samples and three non-uniform samples under different densities and different water loads were selected to test. In this study, to identify the effect of shape factor on permeability of coarse-grained particle, mineralogy of samples was carried out using X-ray diffraction analysis by XRD.

The results of the research show that the permeability in the horizontal direction is often greater than the permeability in the vertical direction and this difference is more pronounced for non-uniform samples compared to uniform samples. The permeability anisotropy rate for uniform samples is between 0.85 and 1.35 and for non-uniform samples in the range of 1.32 to 3.5.