| dc.description.abstract | As a step towards sustainability and environmental protection, use of waste
material and by-products in construction activities is becoming a trend. Quarry dust
is a waste product of stone crushing process, which can be effectively used as a
shallow ground stabilizer. This research investigates the behaviour of improved soil
under a shallow foundation, by adding various mix proportions of quarry dust to the
natural weak soil. Further, based on the foundation stability analysis, determining
an optimum proportion of soil + quarry dust mix is studied. This is done by
numerically analysing the displacement, shear strength, stresses, strains, and safety
factors of stabilized soil underneath a shallow foundation. The study confirms that
mixing quarry dust with natural weak soil - layered under a shallow foundation can
significantly improve the stability of the respective foundation. This is due to the
improvement of soil shear strength parameters, i.e. cohesion and friction angles,
which are used for the stability analysis in the numerical model – incorporating the
Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion. Further, it can be concluded that the optimum
quarry dust mix proportion that yields the highest factor of safety of the foundation
is around 60% - 80%, in which further increase in quarry dust % can cause
reduction in the stability, due to unbalanced effect of cohesion and friction angle of
mixed soil. Overall, the study concludes that mixing quarry dust with natural weak
soil can be considered as a better ground improvement technique; however, the
optimum mix proportion has to be determined after a careful analysis of the specific
soil types, ground conditions and the applied loads. | en_US |
