UTILIZATION OF STONE DUST TO IMPROVE THE PROPERTIES OF EXPANSIVE SOIL

Due to rapid growth of population and industrialization there is tremendous increase in construction activities. The cities and villages are coming closer, there is fast growth of vehicles running on roads. There is shortage of land for construction of buildings, roads, highways and airfields. The land available may not be suitable for construction activites. The soil may be black cotton, clayey, and loamy. The existing site conditions may or may not be sufficiently strong enough to withstand the load coming on it. In order to over come these problem ground improvement technique such as soil stabilization, soil reinforcement etc. are evolved. The mechanical stabilization of soil proves to be cost effective and reliable. As the property of clayey soil proves to be suitable for mechanical stabilization, the cohesive natured clayey soil were chosen and checked for their geotechnical properties with other general soil characteristics by varying the content of stone dust. Due to increase in construction activities the demand of crushed stone for buildings, road, railway ballast and concrete work is increased. For crushing of stones large number of crusher units are installed. The aggregates are produced by blasting and crushing of stones in mechanical crushers, the stone dust is formed in primary and secondary crushing, screening and stock piling. Stone dust is mainly produced during crushing operations. This is a waste product and leads to pollution as well as problem for stock piling it on crusher site to reduce the pollution as well as disposal problem. The present paper deals with the study to be carried out to assess utilization of stone dust in road, highway construction the experimental program consisting of evaluating firstly the properties of original expansive soils collected from different location and the stone dust collected from same locations for modifications of soils. The modification of soil is carried out by addition of stone dust to original expansive soils in the range of 0 to 60% by the percentage increase of 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% and 60% the effect of stone dust on liquid limit, plastic limit, plasticity index, dry density, optimum moisture content and CBR values is considered.