Constitutive modeling of coal ash using modified cam clay model

Abstract

Coal ash is a by-product from coal-fired power plants that generates electricity. These waste materials most of the time is kept in storage facilities. Due to the growing demand in electricity generation, storage facilities can no longer accommodate the waste materials. Instead of disposing the waste materials, it can be used as a construction material. A promising civil engineering structure that can use coal ash as a construction material is land reclamation. The structure needs huge volume of materials and this can maximize the usage of coal ash. In the Philippines, most land reclamation projects are conducted at the sea. From this, distilled water was replaced with sea water to have a better evaluation of the strength properties of coal ash. Consolidated drained test was performed having three conditions with respect to sea water exposure. First condition is no exposure, second condition is immediate exposure and third condition is prolonged exposure. Results show that coal ash exposed to seawater, immediate and prolonged, has smaller shear strength. On the other hand, it still has reasonable strength suitable for land reclamation projects. Constitutive modeling using Modified Cam Clay model is incorporated in the study to be able to predict its behavior and failure in terms of mean effective stress, deviator stress and specific volume.