A Study on the Effect of Zeolite in Lime Treated Clayey Soil

Nowadays organic clay soil can be found in many reclaimed lands. These soil exhibit high settlement potential and low strength. So this soil needs to be improved by means of effective ground improvement techniques. Commonly used conventional and low cost technique is to modify the soil with lime at the site itself to make it suitable for construction and allow it to increase its strength by pozzolanic reactions between lime and clay minerals. Lime is found to be an effective stabilization material for clayey soil, but it is not as such in soil containing organic impurities. In this study an attempt is made to improve the performance of lime treated organic clay by adding a catalyst zeolite by conducting laboratory test. The unconfined compressive strength test (UCC) is conducted on remoulded samples for different curing period. The addition of synthetic zeolite in lime organic stabilized soil has much increased the soil strength on curing. The unconfined compressive strength of optimum percentage of lime treated soil with 8% zeolite shows 97% increase for 56 days of curing period. Increase in Maximum Dry Density (MDD) is also found during zeolite addition for the lime treated soil. Maximum increase in MDD is observed for the soil with 8% lime and 5% zeolite.