Peat soils stabilization using lime-cement mixture to prevent peat fires

Abstract

Peat fires in tropical peatland causes significant damage to peatland ecology and the landscape. Peat fires are usually occurred during the regular dry season for agricultural purposes such as oil palm plantation. Peat soils is one of the problematic soils due to its high water content, low shear strength, high organic, low bearing capacity and high compressibility. Because of these problems, improvement method such as compaction and stabilization are important when the peat soils use as a soil foundation. This paper describes laboratory research done on strength for stabilized of peat to evaluate their different physical and mechanical properties mainly compaction, unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and the California bearing ratio (CBR) test. Burning test was also conducted to observe the effect of stabilization of peat soils to prevent peat fires. The stabilizing agents used were 5% lime (CaCO3) and Portland Composite Cement (PCC). Different variation of PCC was used in experiments for the optimum variation. Optimum moisture content was taken 100% based on the other research. In UCS and CBR test, the highest of strength increase occurred in variations 15% PCC were equal to 59.44% and 100.17% respectively compare than the pure peat soils. While in burning test, stabilized peat soils has a burning point and ash point much longer time to start burning and completely become ash than pure peat soils. Stabilized peat soils can increase the burning process time and not easy to fire.