Abstract
Soil stabilization, through either physical or chemical techniques of coating-cementation development, is a commonly adopted practice in geotechnical and transportation engineering projects used to strengthen soils and mitigate negative geo-environmental impacts. This can be particularly important in enhancing the mechanical properties of soils which are prone to degradation of their response because of freezing and thawing actions. It was attempted in this research study to examine the effect of lime–zeolite stabilization on the behavior of a silt-sized natural soil of low plasticity, by performing standard compaction tests as well as unconfined compressive experiments evaluating the strength of the composite samples. The natural soil mixed with various contents of lime and zeolite partial replacement was subjected to consecutive freezing and thawing cycles. The results from the study showed significant improvement of the mechanical performance of the treated soil when mixed with lime partially replaced with zeolite in terms of strength and durability and, based on scanning electron microscopic images, additional insights were attempted to be obtained on the microstructure of the specimens subjected to temperature changes.
Highlights
The very complex and unpredictable behavior of clayey soils, with their widespread existence throughout the world, has created many problems in construction projects
The material was classified as CL in accordance with the unified soil classification system (USCS), considering that the plasticity index is equal to 7.9% and the liquid limit is equal to 29.1%
For the composite specimens without zeolite partial replacement, it was noticed that as L(%) increased from 2.5% to 8%, MDUW decreased by 0.6 kN/m3 and OWC increased by 2.8%
Summary
The very complex and unpredictable behavior of clayey soils, with their widespread existence throughout the world, has created many problems in construction projects. The natural clayey (and silty) soil available in situ may not be feasible to be used in the construction project directly due primarily to their considerably low shear strength and noticeably excessive deformations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], or because of the expansive nature of some in situ soils [8,9,10]. The characteristics of finegrained soils, including their (micro-)structure and strength, can be affected, significantly, by consecutive freezing and thawing, which typically degrades their durability, posing potential risks for the long-term performance of constructed facilities. As the literature would suggest, this is a very important encountered problem in cold regions, influencing the integrity of infrastructures and structural materials [13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
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