Evaluating the compaction behaviour of soft marine clay stabilized with two sizes of recycled crushed tiles

Abstract

This paper focuses on stabilizing marine clay using recycled blended tiles (RBT) collected from construction sites at Johor, Malaysia. Marine clay is considered as problematic soil due to the existence of high moisture and organic contents, while RBT is a waste tile material produced in every construction area where those cracked or rejected tiles are dumped into landfills without any concern of the environmental impact. Hence, the suitability of RBT to treat marine clay is examined in this study. Standard proctor tests were conducted for all treated and untreated specimens. The compaction ability of treated and untreated marine clay was measured by adding two different sizes of RBT, i.e. 0.063 and 0.15 mm diameter. RBT for both sizes was added and tested in four different percentages (i.e. 10, 20, 30 and 40% of the dry weight of soil). The optimum moisture content (OMC) and Maximum Dry Density (MDD) for untreated samples were 22 and 1.59 Mg/m3 respectively. Meanwhile, OMC and MDD varied from 18 to 16.5% and 1.66–1.72 Mg/m3 respectively for those samples treated with 0.063 mm RBT. In addition, OMC and MDD for samples stabilized with 0.15 mm RBT varied from 18 to 17% and 1.70–1.74 Mg/m3 respectively. For samples treated with 0.15 mm RBT, the higher is the percentage of additive, the higher the MDD and the lower the OMC. While for samples treated with 0.063 mm RBT, 30% was found to be the optimum value and further increment of RBT resulted in a reduction of MDD.