ABSTRACT
At water contents greater than the shrinkage limit for a given soil, decreasing water contents have been shown to be directly related to increasing soil suction values. This phenomenon also results in decreasing void ratios as the water content increases. The slope of this relationship was determined to be linear for a silty clay above the shrinkage limit (Hamberg, 1985; Nelson and Miller, 1996) and because of that, the slope of the linear relation between water content and void ratio along the SWCC can be used to predict volume changes or free field heave.
