Quantification of Benefits of Soil Stabilized Pavement Layers for Sustainable Road Infrastructure

Abstract

The service life and performance of pavements depend mainly on the quality of the materials used for construction. Naturally available materials such as soil, stone aggregates, sand etc. and some of the processed materials like bitumen are conventionally used for road construction. But they are depleting fast and results in higher procurement and processing cost. Therefore, alternative materials such industrial wastes, chemical products are considered for road construction. If these materials can be suitably utilised in highway construction, the pollution and scarcity of aggregates problems may be partly reduced. In the present study, a soil stabilizer produced by the Stabilroad is investigated for its application in pavement layers. The Stabilroad stabilizer should be used along with cement which can be mixed with the existing soil. This makes the pavement layers to have good compressive strength as well as flexible and waterproof. The StabilRoad allows the agencies to stabilize different soils and build roads using locally available soil without the need to extract new material from the mines. Different dosages of cement and Stabilroad are mixed with the available soil and their geotechnical characteristics are evaluated. The focus was to study the strength characteristics of untreated and stabilized soil samples by Unconfined compressive strength and resilient behaviour under cyclic loading conditions using cyclic triaxial test procedure as per AASHTO T-307 protocol. Typical Red soil was collected for present study investigation. The optimal dosage of cement and stabilizer was determined based on laboratory studies. The strength properties of stabilized soils were determined at optimum dosage. Using the results, alternative pavements were designed according to IRC guidelines and validated using KENLAYER software. The critical strains were found to decrease with stabilized subgrades as compared to natural soil as subgrade. A cost comparison analysis is carried out to assess the financial benefit of using the Stabilroad. The reduction in virgin aggregates consumption due to the use of stabilized pavement layer is presented. Typical Red soil was collected for the present investigation.