3.

2 fhe Unlllod Soll Claslllcallon Syetem (USCS)

49

under highway pavements. The Federal Aation Administration (FAA) of

the U.S. Department of Transportation had its own soil classification
system for the design of airport pavements, but it now uses the Unified

Soil Classification SYstem'

Once you become familiar with the details, both the USCS and
AASHTO systems are easy to use in enginenng practice.

3.2 THE UNIFIED SOIL CLASSIFICATION

SYSTEM (USCS)
This system was originally developed by Professor A. Casagrande
(1948) for use in airfield construction during World War II. It was
rnoditied in 1952 by Professor Casagrande, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make the system also
applicable to dams, foundations, and other construction (U.S. Army Enginecr Waterways Experiment Station, 1960). The basis for the USCS is
that coarse-grained soils can be classified according to their gfain size
distributions, whereas the engineering behavior of fine-grained soils is
prirnarily related to their plasticity. In other words, soils in which "fines"
(silts and clays) do not hffect the englneering performance ale classified
according to their grain size characteristics, and soils in wtuch fines do
control the engineering behavior are classified according to their plasticity
characteristics. Therefore, only a sieve analysis and the Atterberg limits are
necessary to completely classify a soil in this system.
The four major divisions in the USCS are indicated in Table 3-1.
They are (l) coarse-grained, (2) fine-grained, (3) organic soifu, and (4) peatClassification is perfq-rmed- qr1 thq-ryalqria!,p-a9ing thg 75 mm sieve, and
the amount of "oversize" material is noted on the drill logs or data sheets.
Particles greater than 30O mm equivalent diameter are termed boulders,
while materials between ?5 mm and 300 run are called cobbles. Coarsegrained soils, sands, and gravels are those havin g 50Vo or more material
retained on the No. 200 sieve. These fractions have been arbitrarily but
conveniently subdided as shown in Table 3-t. Fine-grained soils are
those having more than 507o passing the No. 200 sieve. The highly organic
soils and peat can gener4lly be identified visually.
The symbols in Table 3-l are combined to form soil group symbols
which correspond to the names of typical soils as shown in Table 3-2.
The coarse-Brained soils are sibdivided into gravels and gravelly soils
(G) and snds and sandy soils (S). The gravels are those having the greater
' percentage of the coarse fraction (particles larger than 4.75 mm diameter)
retained on the No. 4 sieve, and the sands are those having the greater
portion passing the No. 4 sive. Both the gravel (G) and the sand (S)

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