A Study on Strength Properties of Expansive Soil Treated with Lime and Nano Silica

There are little investigations in the literature on the nanotechnology's application in the geotechnical field. Since, lots of soil and rock minerals are Nano material and their chemical reactions are in the Nano-silica, there is a great potential for the use of this technology in different fields of geotechnical engineering such as seepage, grouting, soil stabilization and etc. In this study the stabilization of a weak soil was investigated using nanomaterial. The weak soil was obtained from prodduturu, Kadapa district and classified as low plasticity clay. CBR tests were conducted in this study. At the first step the effect of lime on the stabilization of the weak soil was investigated. The results proved a little effect of lime in the soil improvement. At the second step, the effect of Nano-silica on the stabilization of the soil-lime mixture was studied. The results illustrated the important effect of Nano-silica in the soil-lime mixture, in which adding Nano-silica increased the CBR strength of the soil and soil-lime mixture. The effects of curing time were also evaluated in this study and the results showed that the CBR strength of the soil-lime mixture increases more rapidly with adding Nano-material.