Assessment of bearing capacity and settlement characteristics of soft soils reinforced by crushed concrete and sodium silicate columns

Abstract

Various building infrastructure projects around the world have resulted in a major rise in waste materials production such as concrete, fly ash, plastic, rice husk, foundry sand, and other materials, raising disposal issues. In soft clay, stone columns are a traditional ground improvement technique. Crushed concrete is abundant and comes from the removal of old buildings as well as waste concrete from new construction. As a result, construction waste recycling is important, both in terms of reducing the amount of open land needed for landfilling and in terms of environmental protection by resource conservation. Laboratory tests were conducted in this research to examine the influence of crushed concrete columns and crushed concrete by adding 6% sodium silicate columns on characteristics of soft soils (kaolin soil). The finding was that adding sodium silicate to crushed concrete gave a better degree of improvement as compared with crushed concrete columns in both cases (flouting and end bearing). But in flouting case show bearing ratio increased by 367% and in end bearing case increased by 611% as compared with bearing ratio of untreted soil at failure.