Effect of Confining Pressure on The Cement Treated Soil

Abstract

Low workability and high water content in soil cause many problems in construction industry. The best way to deal with this is to replace the existing soil by good quality soil which may not be feasible every time due to scarcity of good quality soil. This issue forces engineers to work on soil stabilization. Out of those many methods of soil stabilization, mixing an admixture like cement, fly ash etc., with soil is the most common method. These additives affect chemical and mechanical properties like bearing capacity, elastic behavior of treated soil, so an additive should be chosen depending upon the soil properties and purpose of stabilization. Unconfined compressive strength is also one of those important parameters which are taken into consideration during soil stabilization but in real life, soil has confining pressure because of the soil present around the specimen under consideration. To follow this actual field situation in analysis and design program, it’s necessary to check the effect of the confinement on the strength of the soil. This study mainly deals with finding out the effect of level of confinement on confined compressive strength of the cement treated soil at different cement to soil weight ratio and different curing periods. To have an idea about the strength of the soil without confinement, specimen for all proportions and curing periods are tested for unconfined compression strength and split tensile strength also.