Internal stability assessment of granular soils using the Kezdi and Sherard methods

Abstract

The methods proposed by Kezdi' and Sherard' are widely used to assess the internal stability of granular soils due to their simplicity, although their accuracy is questionable, especially for widely graded soils. A modification was thus developed to increase the accuracy of these methods while keeping them as straightforward as possible. A simple graphical method is proposed to determine the possible range of delimiting particle size and then the Kezdi and Sherard methods are applied only to this range. The proposed modification was verified with a large number of experimental test results.