Application of SEM to Analysis of Permeability Coefficient of Cohesive Soils

A series of experiments on samples of five clayey soils gave evidence that cyclic freezing and thawing significantly affects the permeability coefficient. An attempt to analyze these changes on base of the Scanning Electron Microscopy SEM photographs of microstructures has been made. A simplistic equation (Eq. 11) has been drawn, describing the permeability coefficient as a function of hydraulic radius and pore area. An approach to determine the permeability coefficient by Eq. (11) on base of SEM photographs, in which the pores were identified manually, yielded results comparable to the Falling Head Test (FHT). However, since the identification of pores in SEM photographs seems the critical point of the method, the Numerical Image Analysis (NIA) has been applied. The procedure of finding the optimum threshold Topt has been described, based on minimization of the deviation ?ki,j, calculated as the absolute value of the difference kSEM,i,j and kFHT,j, i.e. the permeability coefficients determined by the SEM analysis and FHT, respectively. It has been proved that the optimum threshold values can be described as a function of image parameters, i.e. mean grey level Lmean and standard deviation σ n.