Effect of Stone Dust on Properties of Soil

Abstract

Abstract: Stone dust is a kind of solid waste material that is generated from stone crushing industry which is abundantly available. It is estimated that each crusher unit produce 15%-20% stone dust. Disposal of such wastes poses lots of geo environmental problems such as landfill disposal problems, health and environmental hazards. The best way to eliminate these problems is to make use such waste. Keeping this in view an experimental study was conducted on locally available soil by mixing it with Stone Dust. The effect of randomly distributed Stone Dust on MDD, OMC, and CBR has been discussed in this report. The percentage of stone dust by dry weight of soil was taken as 10%, 20%, 30%, and 50%.The first series of compaction, specific gravity and CBR tests were conducted on the soil and the same tests were conducted in the second series on soil samples mixed with stone dust. Laboratory experiments favorably suggest that mixing stone dust with soil would be effective in improving soil properties. Due to rapid growth of population and industrialization there is tremendous increase in construction activities. The cities and villages are coming closer, there is fast growth of vehicles running on roads. There is shortage of land for construction of buildings, roads, highways and airfields. The land available may not be suitable for construction activities. The soil may be black cotton, clayey, and loamy. The existing site conditions may or may not be sufficiently strong enough to withstand the load coming on it. In order to overcome these problem ground improvement technique such as soil stabilization, soil reinforcement etc. are evolved. The mechanical stabilization of soil proves to be cost effective and reliable. As the property of clayey soil proves to be suitable for mechanical stabilization, the cohesive natured clayey soil were chosen and checked for their geotechnical properties with other general soil characteristics by varying the content of stone dust The modification of soil is carried out by addition of stone dust to original expansive soils in the range of 0 to 50% by the percentage increase of 10%, 20%, 30%, and 50% and the effect of stone dust on liquid limit, plastic limit, plasticity index, dry density, optimum moisture content and CBR values is considered