Use of coal ash of thermal power plant for highway embankment construction

Abstract

The highway embankment construction allows to consume a huge volume of coal ash up to hundreds of thousands of tons per km. However, this is a material with very different physical and chemical properties from traditional materials, which requires different design, construction and acceptance solutions. This article first presents the results of the laboratory experiments to evaluate and classify coal ash according to the AASHTO M145 and ASTM C618, TCVN 9436-2012 standards. These results help to define the composition, construction and acceptance solutions of the road bed made of ash in Vietnamese conditions. The proposed solutions have been experimented at a road section constructed in 2017 in Ha Nam with the large scale (100m of grade IV, 12m wide, 2.2m high, 960 tons of coal ash) and conduced to analytical results.