Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Calibration Of Non-Nuclear Devices For Construction Quality Control Of Compacted Soils, Joshua E. R. Wells

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Inadequate compaction of a soil subgrade can lead to detrimental outcomes that are not only costly but dangerous to the general public. To avoid this, quality control (QC) devices such as the nuclear density gauge (NDG) are currently being used to monitor the compaction and moisture content of soil subgrades. However, regulatory concerns associated with the NDG have encouraged federal and state agencies, as well as the heavy civil construction industry to consider non-nuclear devices for QC testing of compacted soils. One such non-nuclear device is the Soil Density Gauge (SDG), which utilizes electromagnetic wave propagation to obtain soil properties …