Geotechnical characterisation of organic clay soils and its stabilisation using cement and nano silica additives

Abstract

Organic soils with low to moderate amounts of organic matter are usually encountered in newlinesome areas of Kerala. These soils are highly compressible and reduce the shear strength newlineand supporting capacity to carry the overlying structures. Organic soils exhibit high newlineplastic in nature due to more water holding capacity and having less cohesion. Nowadays, newlinedemand is increasing to construct various civil infrastructures due to the rapid increase newlineof urban industrialisation and population growth. To improve the engineering properties newlineof organic soils before building the structures, it demands to characterise and stabilise the newlineorganic soil deposits containing moderate organic matter content. However, if the ground newlinepresents with high organic matter content, it is best not utilising such soil profiles to newlineconstruct the buildings. Therefore, the present investigation focused on characterising the newlineorganic clay soils with low to moderate organic matter content and improving newlineengineering properties by adopting chemical stabilisation techniques. newlineAt the initial phase, a series of experiments were conducted on inorganic and organic newlineclay soils to characterise the influence of organic content and type of organic matter on newlinegeotechnical properties of soils. The properties are including consistency limits, newlinecompaction parameters, consolidation settlement, and shear strength properties. For the newlinepresent study, the inorganic clay soil was collected from the Pantheerankavu field site newlinelocated about 12 km from Calicut city. In addition to that commercially available clays newlineincluding sodium bentonite and kaolinite clays were procured. Hence the clays used in newlinethis study are having a different kind of clay minerals. Organic clay soils were processed newlineartificially after adding the starch type of organic matter into the above-collected clay newlinesoils.Herein the starch organic matter was added in different proportions of 2 to 15% newlineinto the clay soils to study the effect of organic content on geotechnical properties of clay newlinesoils. newline