A discussion of the application of mercury intrusion porosimetry for the investigation of soils, including an evaluation of its use to estimate volume change in compacted clayey soils

The pore-size distribution (PSD) as measured by mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) has often been advanced as a parameter to help interpret geotechnical behaviour. It has been correlated with saturated hydraulic conductivity (Garcia-Bengochea et al., 1979; Juang & Holtz, 1986; Lapierre et al., 1990) and frost heave (Reed et al., 1979), and qualitatively with macroscopic volume change (Griffiths & Joshi, 1989; Qi et al., 1996; Al-Mukhtar et al., 1996). Prapaharan et al. (1985) and Romero et al. (1999) used cumulative PSD curves to attempt...