Target Reliability Approach to Study the Effect of Fiber Reinforcement on UCS Behavior of Lime Treated Semiarid Soil
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 29, Issue 6
Abstract
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of stabilizing expansive soil with two different types of fibers, fiber mesh (FM) and fiber cast (FC), in conjunction with chemical stabilization. The intention of this study is to evaluate the effect of these fibers and lime in stabilizing expansive soil by improving its unconfined compressive strength (UCS) behavior. The effect of varying lengths (6 and 12 mm) and amounts (0.2, 0.4, and 0.6% dosage by weight of soil) of FC and FM fibers and varying curing periods (0, 7, 28, 60, 120, 180, and 360 days) on the UCS and on secant modulus of a semiarid expansive soil, in the presence of lime, was investigated. The main focus of this paper is on the determination of optimum fiber reinforcement parameters (in terms of fiber type, length, and dosage) for the stabilization of expansive soil in terms of UCS, which is of a prime importance in soil stabilization projects for practicing engineers. In deterministic optimization, the uncertainties associated with pavement system subgrade soil are not explicitly taken into account. Hence, resulting optimal solutions may lead to reduced pavement reliability levels. Therefore, this paper also focuses on determining the optimum amounts of reinforcement for desired UCS performance of lime-blended expansive soil using the target reliability approach (TRA). Experimental data were used to develop a parabolic model including factors such as length and dosage of fiber types to predict UCS as a response variable. In addition, it was concluded that TRA can be successfully employed in expansive soil stabilization applications to determine the optimum length and dosage of fiber reinforcements.
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Acknowledgments
This project was funded by the National Plan for Science, Technology and Innovation (MAARIFAH), King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Award Number (11BUI1489-02). The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped the cause of the manuscript.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 29 • Issue 6 • June 2017
Copyright
©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 31, 2016
Accepted: Sep 27, 2016
Published online: Feb 1, 2017
Published in print: Jun 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Jul 1, 2017
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