Estimation of saturated hydraulic conductivity of Korean weathered granite soils using a regression analysis

Abstract

Saturated soil hydraulic conductivity is a very important soil parameter in numerous practical engineering applications, especially rainfall infiltration and slope stability problems. This parameter is difficult to measure since it is very highly sensitive to various soil conditions. There have been many analytical and empirical formulas to predict saturated soil hydraulic conductivity based on experimental data. However, there have been few studies to investigate in-situ hydraulic conductivity of weathered granite soils, which constitute the majority of soil slopes in Korea. This paper introduces an estimation method to derive saturated hydraulic conductivity of Korean weathered granite soils using in-situ experimental data which were obtained from a variety of slope areas of South Korea. A robust regression analysis was performed using different physical soil properties and an empirical solution with an R-2 value of 0.9193 was suggested. Besides that this research validated the proposed model by conducting in-situ saturated soil hydraulic conductivity tests in two slope areas.