Soil compaction is an essential stage in the construction of earth dams, through the course of history there have been several reports on dam failures that can be linked to inappropriate compaction. Therefore it is essential to evaluate the state of compaction achieved in the field, two commonly used methods to evaluate it are the conventional and nuclear methodologies. The conventional methodology consists in using the sand cone test to access the wet unit weight and the oven method to determinate the fill water content, in the nuclear methodology these parameters are measured with a nuclear density gauge. However in some countries the accuracy of the nuclear gauge measurement relatively to the conventional methodology has been questioned. The present paper establishes a correlational analysis between the results obtained with the sand cone test and the nuclear density-meter, these tests were executed during the quality control operation employed at the trial embankment of an earth dam.publishe
