Applicability of normal and shear stress cells embedded in cohesionless materials

A normal stress cell and a shear stress cell have been designed and tested under very varied conditions including permanent strain. Results pooled from nine different tests with the cells embedded in cohesionless materials (sand and wheat) showed that the coefficient of variation of the normal stress-cell sensitivity was 0.04, while it was 0.10 for the shear cell. The agreement between predicted and measured sensitivity was considered to be good for the normal stress cell and reasonably good for the shear stress cell. The shear cell showed a systematic dependence, within acceptable limits, of the total stress state in the surrounding material. A qualitative explanation of this phenomenon is given. Paper was presented at the SEM VI International Congress on Experimental Mechanics held in Portland, OR in June 6–10, 1988.