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.
Stabilization of Black cotton soil using Fly ash