Abstract
When mudstone is employed as a fill material, the slaking or degeneration of the material often causes the engineering problem such as excessive surface settlement or slope failure of an embankment. The present study is theoretically and experimentally concerned with the settlement characteristics of compacted mudstone materials subjected to submergence, by considering the mechanical properties of compacted mudstone and the mechanism of unsaturated seepage flow. Although there remains the problem that the conditions treated in this study are strongly idealized and restricted, it has been found that the theory can explain the time history of both settlement and moisture content of a compacted mudstone material subjected to submergence. Moreover, some settlement characteristics has been revealed from the experimental results.
