Some clayey soils are generally classified as expansive soils which cause extensive damage to civil engineering structures due to change in its water content and the amount and type of clay size particles. Other important factors affecting the expansion behavior include the amount of non-expansive materials. This paper based on comparing two solutions to improve the soil parameters: the first solution to improve the soil with steel fiber and the second solution to improve the soil strength and volume changes with plastic waste material. Various tests conducted to study the effect of using different percentages of steel fiber and plastic waste material (4%, 8% and 12%) for each additives by dry weight of soil. The results presents that the steel fiber and plastic waste material significantly improved the soil strength and volume changes besides the physical properties of expansive clay soil which have susceptibility of swelling.
Expansive soils are generally found in arid and semiarid regions. These soils undergo volumetric changes upon wetting and drying, thereby causing ground heave and settlement problems. This characteristic causes considerable construction defects if not adequately taken care of. Solving the unsaturated soil problems needs the assessment of suction variation in time and space as a response to the variation of environmental factors such as rainfall and evaporation.To investigate the effect of the changes of the soil suction on the volume changes, expansion index, swelling pressure, shear strength and the coefficient of permeability, small scale experiments were conducted using pure bentonite and the bentonite mixed with sand in proportion of: 30%, 40% and 50% at different initial water contents and dry unit weights was chosen from the compaction curves. The study shows that the swelling-potential, swellingpressure, the soil-suction, the soil-strength and the coefficient of permeability are affected by the initial-conditions (water-content and dry-unit weight), where all these parameters except the permeability-coefficient marginally decrease with the increase in soil-water content, while the coefficient-of permeability increases with increasing the water-content.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.