Offshore developments for hydrocarbon resources have now progressed to water depths approaching 2500 m. Due to the difficulties and high cost in recovering high quality samples from deepwater site, there is increasing reliance on in situ tests such as piezocone and full-flow (i.e. T-bar and ball) penetration tests for determining the geotechnical design parameters. This research was undertaken in collaboration with the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), as part of a joint industry project, to improve the reliability of in situ tests in determining design parameters and to improve offshore site investigation practice in deepwater soft sediments. In this research, a worldwide high quality database was assembled and used to correlate intact and remoulded shear strengths (measured from laboratory and vane shear tests) with penetration resistances measured by piezocone, T-bar and ball penetrometers. The overall statistics showed similar and low levels of variability of resistance factors for intact shear strength (N-factors) for all three types of penetrometer. In the correlation between the remoulded penetration resistance and remoulded shear strength, the resistance factors for remoulded shear strength (Nrem-factors) were found higher than the N-factors. As a result, the resistance sensitivity is less than the strength sensitivity. The correlations between the derived N-factors and specific soil characteristics indicated that the piezocone N-factors are more influenced by rigidity index than those for the T-bar and ball penetrometers. The effect of strength anisotropy is only apparent in respect of N-factors for the T-bar and ball penetrometers correlated to shear strengths measured in triaxial compression. On the other hand, the Nrem-factors showed slight tendency to increase with increasing strength sensitivity but were insensitive to soil index properties. These findings suggest that the full-flow penetrometers may be used to estimate remoulded shear strength and are potentially prove more reliable than the piezocone in estimating average or vane shear strength for intact soil but the reverse is probably true for the estimation of triaxial compression strength.

[Truncated abstract] This research has studied the penetration and extraction resistance profiles of different types of penetrometers in soft clay. The penetrometers of interest include the cone, T–bar, ball and plate. Effects of the surface roughness and aspect ratio of the T–bar penetrometer on its resistance have also been investigated. Undrained shear strength, Su, profiles derived from the penetration tests are compared with the shear strengths measured from field vane shear tests and laboratory (triaxial and simple shear) tests. Both in situ and centrifuge model penetration tests were undertaken for the research. In addition, ‘undisturbed’? tube samples were retrieved from both the field and the centrifuge strongbox samples (after completion of the centrifuge tests) for laboratory testing. The in situ testing was carried out in Western Australia, at the Burswood site near Perth, with tests including cone, T–bar, ball and plate penetrometer tests, and vane shear tests. Interestingly, the T–bar, ball and plate (‘full-flow’) penetrometers showed a narrow band of resistance profiles both during penetration and extraction, with a range of around 15 % between the highest and lowest profiles and standard deviation of 15 %. However, the cone penetrometer gave similar resistance at shallow depths but increasingly higher penetration resistance at depths greater than 7 m – a phenomenon that is also common in offshore results. During extraction, the cone penetrometer gave a higher resistance profile than the full–flow penetrometers for much of the depth of interest. The Su profile measured directly from the vane shear tests falls within the Su profiles derived from the penetration resistances of the full–flow penetrometers, using a single bearing factor, N = 10.5 (the value originally suggested in the literature for a T–bar penetration test). Again, the cone penetrometer demonstrated diverging results, requiring two separate values for the cone factor, Nkt (10.5 initially increasing to 13 for depths below 10 m) in order to give Su similar to the vane shear tests. This highlights the possible variability of the cone factor with depth. Cyclic penetration and extraction tests were performed at specific depths for each fullflow penetrometer. These tests comprised displacement cycles of ±0.5 m about the relevant depth, recording the penetration and extraction resistances over five full cycles. The results may be used to derive the remoulded strength and sensitivity of the soil. Laboratory tests such as triaxial and simple shear tests were performed on ‘undisturbed’ tube samples retrieved from the same site to evaluate the in situ shear strengths in the laboratory. However, the resulting Su data were rather scattered, much of which may be attributed to variable sample quality due to the presence of frequent shell fragments and occasional silt lenses within the test samples. In general, N factors for the full–low penetrometers, back–calculated using Su values measured from the simple shear tests, fell mainly in a range between 9.7 and 12.8 (between 10.4 and 12.2 for the standard size T–bar (250 mm x 40 mm))

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