ABSTRACT
A soil can be visualized as a skeleton of solid particles enclosing continuous voids which contain water and/or air. For the range of stresses usually encountered in practice the individual solid particles and water can be considered incompressible; air, on the other hand, is highly compressible. The volume of the soil skeleton as a whole can change due to rearrangement of the soil particles into new positions, mainly by rolling and sliding, with a corresponding change in the forces acting between particles. The actual compressibility of the soil skeleton will depend on the structural arrangement of the solid particles. In a fully saturated soil, since water is considered to be incompressible, a reduction in volume is possible only if some of the water can escape from the voids. In a dry or a partially saturated soil a reduction in volume is always possible due to compression of the air in the voids, provided there is scope for particle rearrangement.
