Development of data acquisition system for consolidated undrained triaxial test

Abstract

Consolidated Undrained (CU) triaxial test is a common laboratory test used in practice for determining effective and total shear strength parameters of soil. This paper reported works carried out to develop a data acquisition system for a self-assembled triaxial machine. The developed system was capable of acquiring signals from the installed sensors (i.e. pressure transducer, load cell, LVDT), interpreting and presenting the data in real-time graphs. In addition, the study highlighted the advantages of performing double vacuuming method to saturate the soil specimen. The saturation can be obtained quicker and at a significantly lower cell pressure compared to the conventional stepwise increment of back pressure and cell pressure method.