ABSTRACT
Because of the dif‚culty in sampling cohesionless soils in anything like an undisturbed condition, engineering of sands and silts depends largely on penetration tests. Penetration tests are also simple and inexpensive, attributes that allow large numbers of tests to characterize the variability of ground properties in the strata of interest. This is not to say that there are no alternatives to penetration testing; there are, and these will be discussed later. But alternatives to penetration tests are dif‚cult to execute, usually offer less accuracy, and do not necessarily provide the information that is needed directly. Estimating soil state from penetration tests is the backbone of liquefaction assessments.
