Determining the Suction Capacity of Compacted Clays with Fuzzy-Set Theory

Water suction capacity is an important parameter affecting the swelling properties and volumetric change of soil. Determination of the water suction capacity is made by the experiments which are needed long time in laboratory. However, this has random errors due to the heterogeneous and anisotropic structure of soil sample together with the error caused by the operator made the experiment. Such an estimation problem, included the errors, may be easily solved with the fuzzy-set theory. In this study, the suction capacity of compacted clayey soils is predicted with the fuzzy-set theory. For this reason, the engineering properties of clayey soil (plasticity index, dry density, initial water content and suction capacity) are partitioned into fuzzy subsets, and fuzzy rules are formed. Later, a computer program in the Fortran language is written to estimate the suction capacity of compacted clayey soil from these properties. It is shown that there is a good similarity between the results of the tests and proposed fuzzy logic model.