dc.description.abstract | bstract: 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 angle, 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 the specific soil
types, ground conditions and the applied loads | en_US |