Stabilization of Black cotton soil using Fly ash

Abstract

Expansive Black cotton clay soils are widely distributed worldwide, and are a significant damage to infrastructure and buildigs. It is a common practice around the world to stabilize black cotton soil using fly ash to improve the strength of stabilized sub- base and sub grade soil. Soil stabilization is the improvement of strength or bearing capacity of soil by controlled compaction, proportioning or addition of suitable admixtures or stabilizers. The Black cotton soils are extremely hard when dry, but lose its strength fully when in wet condition. In monsoon they guzzle water and swell and in summer they shrink on evaporation of water from there. Because of its high Swelling and shrinkage characteristics the black cotton soils has been a challenge to the highway engineers.So in this research paper fly ash has been used to improve the various strength properties of natural black cotton soil.The objective of this research paper is to improve the engineering properties of black cotton soil by adding different percentage of fly ash by the weight of soil and make it suitable for construction. A series of standard Proctor tests (for calculation of MDD and OMC) and California Bearing Ratio (C.B.R) tests are conducted on both raw Black cotton soil and mixed soil with different percentages of fly ash (5%, 10%, 20%, 30%) by weight. A comparison between properties of raw black cotton soil, black cotton soil mixed with fly ash are performed .It is found that the properties of black cotton soil mixed with fly ash are suitably enhanced.