Relationship between Chemical Weathering Indices and Shear Strength of Highly and Completely Weathered Granite in South Korea

Abstract

In South Korea, weathered granite is widely distributed and has been used as a bearing stratum for various structures. Therefore, it is important to determine the shear strength of the weathered granite. However, it is difficult to obtain reliable shear strength parameters with laboratory tests or standard penetration test (SPT) because weathered granite is easily crushed during the sampling process, and the penetrability of SPT is not secured. On the other hand, it is well known that weathering affects the variation of geotechnical properties. Based on this concept, this study reports a correlation between the shear strength parameters and the chemical weathering indices of the weathered granite. In this study, the pressuremeter test (PMT) was adopted to determine the friction angle of the weathered granite. For the identical granite, the chemical weathering indices (Vogt’s Ratio (VR), Chemical Index of Alteration (CIA), and Mobiles Index (Imob)) were measured by X-ray fluorescence (XRF). An estimating model considering both site-specific characteristics and degree of weathering was used, and the CIA showed the best correlation (R2 = 0.66) with friction angle among the weathering indices. Since the ratio of measured friction angle over the predicted one was distributed in the range from 0.8 to 1.2, it is more reasonable to predict friction angles based on CIA comparing to using the SPT-N value. It can contribute to a better estimation of friction angles of weathered granite.