Water consumption in earthworks can be an important economical and environmental issue for projects realised in some specific geological and climatic contexts. The question is, in particular, to assess the risk of using dry or arid soils, which long-term behaviour remains uncertain. Recent siteobservations and research results are leading to distinguish two problems: the difficult compaction of dry soils and their long-term behaviour, in particular due to wetting. The answers that are brought in this paper indicate that, even if it needs intense energy, compaction of dry soils can lead to sufficiently high compaction rate to avoid wetting-induced settlements for low to moderate plasticity soils. This gives arguments for a designof road and railways embankments built with dry and arid soils, but also points out the high necessity of intense compaction control. For the covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
Samenvatting