Effect of cement and bentonite mixture on the consolidation behavior of soft estuarine soils

Abstract

In order to study the effect of mixed cementitious materials on the consolidation behavior of soft estuarine soils in South East Queensland, a series of oedometer tests were performed in the geotechnical laboratory. To fulfill the objectives, specimens were prepared with different additive content of stabilizing agents and were cured for 7 and 28 days, in which cement content remained at 10 % while the content of bentonite was varied from 2.5% to 7.5%. The testing results indicate that both cement-treated and cement-bentonite treated samples represented a significant decrease in compressibility compared with untreated samples, in which cement-bentonite mixture shows higher effect on soil stabilization than cement only. However, with the increase of bentonite content, the consolidation behavior of cement-bentonite treated samples did not change consistently which indicates that the effectiveness of cement-bentonite mixture has no linear relationship with the bentonite content and the optimum bentonite content is around 5%.