TECHNICAL PAPER Technique to Avoid Membrane Punching During Triaxial Test of Crushed Aggregate Israa Jamal Alhani 1 & Wael Mahmood Albadri 1 & Mohd Jamaludin Md Noor 1 & Soon Yee Wong 2 & Kim Yuen Wong 3 Accepted: 25 October 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Purpose In triaxial test, a rubber membrane encloses the specimen. The membrane is specifically thin to a thickness of no influence on the test results. However, testing coarse-grained materials in triaxial test might be challenging due to the occurrence of membrane punching. In trial tests, the angular aggregate easily punches the membrane. Methods A technique was explored to mitigate membrane punching due to sharp edges of angular materials. One method has filter paper inserted between two membranes and another method has aluminium foil instead of filter paper. Results The use of filter paper and aluminium foil as insert materials is successful in preventing the membrane punching. Consequently, the filter paper is not contributing to additional resistance when used as protection between two membranes as compared to aluminium foil. Conclusion This paper investigates the performance of the protection materials by experiments. Essentially, the filter paper had no significant effect on test results; this fact was verified through numerical modelling and comparative tests by using rounded particles material. Keywords Triaxial test . Rounded particles . Angular particles . Membrane punching 1 Introduction A very thin rubber membrane is made to specific thickness for the triaxial test to minimize the restraining effect on the test results, membrane correction applied where applicable to the results. According to British standards (BS EN ISO 17892-9-2018, clause 5.3.4), the membrane thickness should not exceed 1% of specimen diameter. Transportation Infrastructure Geotechnology https://doi.org/10.1007/s40515-020-00141-8 * Israa Jamal Alhani esraahamad909@gmail.com Extended author information available on the last page of the article