Study on use of Thermal Power Plant Waste as Filling Material in Road Embankment

The social and economical development of a country depends on various social parameters as well as availability of various infrastructural facilities. Among the various infrastructural facilities available for development the road transport infrastructure plays an important role for an under developing country. Therefore, the soil is the prime need for filling for the construction of road, highway embankments. Natural river sand and local sand are used as the conventional filling material. Large amount of natural soil and aggregates are also required to excavated or to be deposited as filling material for roads, highway, embankment and mining is ban by Government and needs the approval. Now a days motivates of development of alternative methods to solve the environmental and economic issues by reusing industrial waste product, and also fulfill the specifications economically. Day by day electrical power requirement is increasing and also increasing thermal power plant waste which generate environmental problems for the people who live around it and statistical observation shows that the current rate of deposition of Pond ash in India has reached approx 170 million tons/annum. About 90, 000 acres of precious cultivable land is used for the storage of abandoned ash. But the current rate of utilization of ash is only about 35-40 %. The unused ash leads to an increasing ponding area for storing of ash and related environmental problems for the people who live around the power plants. Besides this, over the last few years, due to development the construction of highways and roads has taken a boost. This requires a large amount of natural soil and aggregates. These are some issues now-a-days which motivates in development of alternative methods to solve the environmental and economic issues. Limited work has been reported in the literature on evaluation of the geotechnical properties of pond ash and their utilization in filling in the road embankment. This present work aims to find out bearing capacity with added in virgin soil in different proportion and layers to find out the maximum bearing strength, to bring in environmental& economical benefits in an eco-friendly manner.