Peat Soil Stabilization using Lime and Cement

This paper presents a study of the comparison between two additive Lime and Cement for treating peat soil in term of stabilization. Peat and organic soils are commonly known for their high compressibility, extremely soft, and low strength. The aim of this paper is to determine the drained shear strength of treated peat soil from Perlis for comparison purposes. Direct Shear Box Test was conducted to obtain the shear strength for all the disturbed peat soil samples. The quick lime and cement was mixed with peat soil in proportions of 10% and 20% of the dry weight peat soil. The experiment results showed that the addition of additives had improved the strength characteristics of peat soil by 14% increment in shear strength. In addition, the mixture of lime with peat soil yield higher result in shear strength compared to cement by 14.07% and 13.5% respectively. These findings indicate that the lime and cement is a good stabilizer for peat soil, which often experienced high amount of moisture content.

Simulating a direct shear box test by DEM

Distinct element simulation was performed for direct shear box (DSB) tests on a dense and a loose two-dimensional (2D) sample of 3259 cylinders. Special attention was devoted to the effect that the frictional force between the inside surface of the upper shear box and the sample had on the measured shear strength in the DSB test. Some ways of minimizing this interface frictional force were introduced in the paper. Given that the deformation approximates simple shear within the deforming zone across the sample centre (referred to as the shear zone), a method was proposed to evaluate the overall strains in the DSB test. The numerically simulated data were used to interpret, on a microscopic scale, the angle of internal friction and a 2D stress–dilatancy equation for the mobilized plane in granular material. It was found that the angle of internal friction in granular material is not directly related to the interparticle friction angle (ϕµ). Instead, it relates to the average interparticle contact angle ([Formula: see text]) on the mobilized plane and the ratio k/f0, representing the degree of the probability distribution of the interparticle contact forces that is biased toward the positive zone of the contact angle θ (along the shear direction), where k is the slope of the linear distribution of the average interparticle contact forces against the interparticle contact angle; and f0 is the average interparticle contact force.Key words: angle of internal friction, direct shear box test, distinct element method, friction, granular material, stress–dilatancy.