Investigation of the shear strength and bearing capacity of contaminated sandy soil by oil products

Abstract EN

Oil stations may pose numerous risks to the environment.

The main environmental risk is associated with the potential leakage from underground oil tanks, which may endanger the soil and/or groundwater.

Consequently, geotechnical and environmental problems may arise.

In this paper, the influence of soil contamination by oil products on the shear strength and bearing capacity of particularly sandy soil has been investigated and analyzed.

An extensive experimental study has been conducted to evaluate the potential impacts of contaminating the sand with different oil products in a variety of contamination content.

The obtained results showed that the contaminated sand may provide quite small apparent cohesion strength that slightly increases by increasing the oil viscosity.

Also, the angle of shearing resistance was found remarkably decreases by increasing both the contaminating oil content and viscosity.

Moreover, the bearing capacity of the contaminated sand has been predicted.

Considerable reduction in the bearing capacity of shallow foundations rested on contaminated sand was revealed.