An experimental study on evaluation of fiber Reinforced-Fly ash stabilized black cotton soil as a sustainable subgrade material

Abstract

With population escalation and the reduction in availability of land, there is a growing demand for structures on weak or soft soils. Black cotton (BC) soil has been considered as a problematic soil because of high swelling potential. Pavements constructed on BC soil subgrade suffer from severe rutting and cracking on the pavement surface. With a focus on avoiding this type of failure in the BC soil, stabilization with reinforcement is preferred recently. The aim of the current work is to check the efficiency of Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC) fiber reinforced-fly ash stabilized black cotton soil as a sustainable subgrade material. PVC fiber as reinforcing material and Fly ash as the admixture for stabilizing the BC soil is used. For minimizing the impact of fly ash on environment, use of waste products in construction work is inevitable and a sustainable solution.In the current research work, Black cotton soil from three different places of Odisha have been collected and treated with different percentage of fly ash and PVC fiber so as to improve different properties of soil. From the results it is found that there is an increase in Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) and California Bearing Ratio (CBR) values of the treated soil and the optimum value of fly ash is found to be 30% and PVC fiber to be 1.5%.