3D Property Modeling of Void Ratio by Cokriging

Void ratio measures compactness of ground soil in geotechnical engineering. When samples are collected in certain area for mapping void ratios, other relevant types of properties such as water content may be also analyzed. To map the spatial distribution of void ratio in the area based on these types of point, observation data interpolation is often needed. Owing to the variance of sampling density along the horizontal and vertical directions, special consideration is required to handle anisotropy of estimator. 3D property modeling aims at predicting the overall distribution of property values from limited samples, and geostatistical method can be employed naturally here because they help to minimize the mean square error of estimation. To construct 3D property model of void ratio, cokriging was used considering its mutual correlation with water content, which is another important soil parameter. Moreover, K-D tree was adopted to organize the samples to accelerate neighbor query in 3D space during the above modeling process. At last, spatial configuration of void ratio distribution in an engineering body was modeled through 3D visualization, which provides important information for civil engineering purpose.