Determination of the Shear Strength of Rockfill from Small-Scale Laboratory Shear Tests: A Critical Review

Table 4

Summary of the previous studies on the specimen size effects of friction angle of granular materials.

Material type	d max (mm)	W/dmax	T/dmax	Respect the standards		Validity of standards	Reference
				W/dmax > 6	T/dmax > 10
Silty sand	0.8	75, 125, 375	30.6, 43.7, 192.5	Yes	Yes	Not validated	Ziaie Moayed et al. [124]
Sand	0.8	75, 125, 375	30.6, 43.7, 192.5	Yes	Yes	Invalidated
	0.9	72, 119, 352	31, 45.2, 209	Yes	Yes	Not validated	Cerato and Lutenegger [123]
	1.2	50, 126.7, 833	26.7, 126.7, 833	Yes	Yes		Palmeira and Milligan [122]
	1.7	36, 60, 179	16, 24, 105	Yes	Yes	Invalidated	Cerato and Lutenegger [123]
	2	30, 51, 152	13, 20.5, 89	Yes	Yes
Gravel	5	12, 20, 61	5, 8, 36	Yes	Yes for the largest box

Specimens not meeting the minimum requirement ratio of ASTM D3080 [46]. Standard BS 1377-7 [48] defines specific d_max for specified specimen sizes. The BS is not thus examined in this paper.