Acta Scientiarum Polonorum

Abstract: The paper concerns the use of microwave oven in determination of water content in soils. Major advantages of microwave oven based method consist in easy access to the equipment and its low cost (around 75–100 €). Besides the method is relatively quick (2–5 minutes). The tests results presented in the paper were obtained on the basis of 19 representative cohesive and cohesionless soils. For each soil water, content was determined in the wide range of its state: from air-dry to liquid state. The carried out tests made possible to obtain very good correlation between water content determined in standard oven and microwave oven methods. In conclusion some hints concerning test procedure were given which might be helpful in its wide application in geotechnical laboratory at site.