Improvement of Pavement Subgrade by Adding Cement and Fly Ash to Natural Desert Sand

Abstract

Soil characteristics are paramount to design pavements and to assess the economic viability of a road. In the desert, such as that found in southern Libya, the very poor quality of soils leads to important pavement distress such as cracks, rutting, potholes, and lateral shear failure on the edges. To improve the strength of desert sand, an innovative approach is proposed, consisting of adding manufactured sand, ordinary Portland cement (OPC), and fly ash (FA) as a binder. OPC and FA improve the characteristics of mixes of crushed fine aggregate (CFA) and natural desert sand (NDS). These results are based on a gradation of two sand sources to determine the particle distribution and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to determine their chemical and physical properties, respectively. This research assesses the effect of cement and fly ash on the geotechnical behavior of two mixtures of fine desert and manufactured sands (30:70% and 50:50%). The mix composed of 26% of CFA, 62% of NDS, 5% of OPC, and 7% of FA shows optimal results in terms of strength, compaction, and bearing capacity characteristics.