Effect of Grain Size on Shear Strength of Coral Gravel Sand

In the study, a series of triaxial tests were carried out on coral gravel sand to investigate the shear strength behaviour of the sand. The coral material were collected from Truong Sa island of Vietnam. To examine the effect of grain-size distribution on the shear strength behaviour, six kinds of coral gravel sand samples with different grain size distributions were used in the experiments. The experimental results indicate that the coral gravel sand contains not only internal friction angle, φ, as other granular materials but also apparent cohesion, c, and these parameters depends on the grain-size distribution. The results show that the strength parameters increase with the increase of the grain size of the coral. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.