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To study the behavior of carbonate sands parametrically, some monotonic triaxial testswere carried out on Kish carbonate sand. The sample was provided from Kish Island beach. Inorder to examine the effect of density and confining pressure, samples in loose and dense stateswere tested under different confining pressures. For studying the effect of drainage andconsolidation, different stress paths were followed. Also to study the effect of particle crushing indrained tests all samples were graded before and after testing. Comparison between loose anddense samples in both drained and undrained tests showed that with increasing confiningpressure, the reduction in shear resistance in loose samples is less than dense samples and theincrement rate of particle crushing in loose samples is more than dense samples. In the range oflow confining pressures both loose and dense samples showed dilation response. With increasingconfining pressure, the loose samples tended to exhibit contraction and the rate of dilation indense samples reduced. Because recovering undisturbed sample of carbonate sediments is veryhard or even impossible so the effect of soil disturbance is not studied in this research.

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The unique behaviour of carbonate materials under shear loading has stimulated in investigating of their geological and engineering properties.Carbonate soils composed of calcium or other carbonates and most abundant in tropical marine environments are of interest from geotechnical view, especially for offshore engineers engaged with Fossil-based fuel exploitation. This was initiated in the early 1960's, when the first offshore borings in the Persian Gulf identified layers of calcarenite and thick layers of sand containing visible shell fragments.For the purpose of exploiting gas and oil resources in hot and temperate climates (e.g. Persian Gulf) off-shore structures have been placed on carbonate soils. The carbonate sediments are high crushable compared with low crushable sediments such as quartzic soils.To examine the crushability of these problematic sediments a series of monotonic compression, extension and post-cyclic triaxial tests under different densities and confining pressures was carried out to study the crushing behaviour of "Rock" carbonate sand obtained from Cornwall, England.It was shown that crushing coefficient decreases with increasing in maximum principal effective stress ratio for both loose and dense states. It seems that for skeletal carbonate sand maximum and minimum dry densities will be changed during shearing loading. In other words, even though the sample has experienced an increase in density, it may also have experienced a reduction in relative density.