Abstract:
Prior to the construction of a highway, inspection of base soil bearing capacity is required. Bearing
capacity of base so.il determines the design thickness of a highway pavement. Several field methods are
available to determine the base soil bearing capacity such as Dynamic Cone Penetrometer (DCP) and
Hand Cone Penetrometer (HCP) and field California Bearing Ratio (field CBR). In practice, the design of
pavement is commonly based on the California Bearing Ratio test. Correlations between the results of
DCP to CBR tests are available. However, as far as can be found in literature, correlation between HCP to
CBR test results is hardly found. This research was performed to study local correlation between HCP
tests, which is simple and fast to conduct, to the field CBR value. The local correlation is determined
based on comparisons of HCP and CBR test results for the same density of soil taken from several
locations in Pekanbaru city, Indonesia. It was found that there is an approximate linear relation between
HCP test results to CBR values for a certain density of soil.
