Stabilization of Expansive Soil with Lime and...

Stabilization of Expansive Soil with Lime and Brick Dust

Author Name : Ajay kumar, Ashok kumar, Ved Prakash

ABSTRACT:  Over the past few decades several factors have led to an increase in the number of people migrating to large cities. Consequently these large cities are getting over populated and quite expectedly necessity of business, residential construction has increased the civil engineering projects located in areas with unsuitable soil is one of the most common problems in many parts of the world. The unsuitable soil (Black cotton Soil) can be stabilized by performing soil stabilization. In India black soil is the most problematic soil when it comes to construction. In rainy season black cotton soil swells and become sticky. Whereas in summers the moisture present in the soil evaporates and soil shrinks resulting in the crack of approximate 10 to 15 cm wide and up to 1 meter deep. The percentage covered by black cotton soil in geotechnical areas of India is 16.6%, which says huge amount of soil in India needs stabilization. Mechanical, chemical, electrical, thermal and other methods are in practice to improve the engineering properties of soil. Chemical stabilization is the best method used for highways and air-field . The black cotton soil is known as expansive type of soil which expands suddenly and start swelling when it comes in contact with moisture. Due to this property of soil the strength and other properties of soil are very poor. To improve its properties it is necessary to stabilize the soil by different stabilizers. Expansive type of soil shows unpredictable behavior with different kind of stabilizers. Soil stabilization is a process to treat a soil to maintain, alter or improve the performance of soil. In The study the results are compared of potential of lime and burnt brick dust as stabilizing additive to expansive soil is evaluated for the improving engineering properties of expansive soil. The evaluation involves the determination of the swelling potential, atterberg’s limits, & compaction test of expansive soil in its natural state as well as when mixed with varying proportion of burnt brick dust and lime .