Soil compaction by wheeling: changes in soil suction caused by compression

Soil compaction caused by agricultural machinery has been increasingly recognized as a considerable problem facing intensive agriculture. Most of the models used to estimate soil deformation during the passage of machines are based on the concept of total stress: they have neglected an important stress variable for unsaturated soils; that is, the matric suction. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the validity of this hypothesis by studying suction variation during a static compression test. A standard oedometer cell equipped with a tensiometer was used to measure soil suction in situ for different vertical stresses. Measurements were carried out on remoulded soil samples obtained by compacting a loamy soil at different initial water suctions (