The strength behaviour of lime stabilized organic clay soil modified by catalyst additeives

Abstract EN

The organic clay soil can be found in many large size reclaimed lands.

These soils present enormously high settlement potential and low strength that needs to be improved by means of effective ground improvement techniques.

One of the low cost techniques is to modify the soil with lime in-situ to make it suitable for construction and allow it to increase in strength by pozzolanic reactions between lime and clay minerals.

Lime is known to be an effective stabilization material for clayey soil.

Nevertheless, its effectiveness may be less with organic clay due to low effective strength properties.

Thus, this study concerns the addition of catalyst i.e.

zeolite which may improve the performance of lime stabilization to accelerate lime-organic clay reactions.

The unconfined compressive test (UCT) is conducted on remoulded samples (38mm x 80mm) for 0, 7, 14 , 28, and 90 days of curing period.

The addition of synthetic zeolite in lime-organic stabilized soil has increased the soil strength by 185% at 90 days curing period at the design mix of organic clay + 10% lime +10% zeolite.

The higher value of UCS indicates that zeolite is an effective catalyst to enhance lime stabilization