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

Determining the shear strength of rockfill is a key task for the design and stability analysis of rockfill structures. When direct shear tests are performed, the well-established ASTM standard requires that specimen width and thickness must be at least 10 and 6 times the maximum particle size (dmax), respectively. When the value of dmax is very large, performing such tests in laboratory with field rockfill becomes difficult or impossible. Four...