Improvement of Soft Soil by Stone Column Treated with Bentonite

Abstract

Soft clayey soils cover wide Iraqi areas specially the regions close to rivers and the southern part of this country Heavy weight structures like: highways, dams, multiple story buildings are suffering unacceptable settlement, when constructing on soft soils. The high contamination of water in such soils decrease the effective stress and reduce bearing capacity. The need was appeared to improve such problematic soil by the use of new technique of stone column treated with different percentages of natural bentonite by a series of field tests using full scale concrete footing constructed on soft soil in addition to a laboratory model to investigate settlement with time at constant stress. The soil that used in this study is natural clayey soil, brought from a location south of Diyala governorate, from a farm area. The study includes also: The effect of stone column diameter treated with bentonite on the behavior of footing constructing on soft clayey soil, The effect of stone column length on the behavior of footing on such soils. Results of field and laboratory model tests reviled that the treated model by stone column mixed with 40% bentonite is the ideal one, which reduces the settlement by 55%. In other hand problems of uneven settlements appear when using 60% bentonite as a mix proportion. The Ideal slenderness ratio (Ds/Ls<25%). The effective depth of stone column treated with bentonite is (1/3H).