---

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.

---

Portland cement can be mixed with sand to improve its mechanical characteristics. Many studies are reported in literature on this topic, but the effect of principal stress rotation has not been investigated yet. Considering the inherent anisotropy of most sands, it is not clear whether the added cement shall contribute to equal increase in strength and stiffness at vertical and horizontal directions or not. Furthermore, it is not well understood how the cement as an additive in non-compacted (loose) sand compared to compacted (dense) sand without cement, contribute to improving the material behavior in undrained condition such as limiting the deformations and the liquefaction potential. In this research, undrained triaxial and simple shear tests under different stress paths are carried out on different mixtures of Portland cement (by adding 1.5, 3 and 5 percent) with clean sand to investigate the effect of principal stress rotations. The triaxial test results revealed that the cement mixture reduces the anisotropy, while it improves the mixture mechanical properties compared to compacted sand without cement. The results of the simple shear tests validated the triaxial test results and further clarified the effect of the  parameter or rotation of principal stresses on the behavior of cemented sand mixtures.