Enhancement of pavement sections on soft clay soils to sustain overloading

Abstract

Over the past few years, the weight of goods that are transported on roads in Egypt has rapidly increased. Engineers have developed safe methods for building roads on soft soils as a result of a growing need for improvement. But Highway pavement design on soft clay soil is still a very difficult problem to solve. It frequently results in issues like unstable roadbeds or excessive settlement. As a result, treating soft soil roadbeds has gained importance. To support the appropriate pavement portion and its traffic loads, this study intends to improve the clay soil using various techniques. In this study, quicklime is used to stabilize soft clay soil. geogrid layers are also used to strengthen the base and subbase layers which increases the overall strength of the pavement section to sustain heavy loads above. A finite element program (PLAXIS 2D) was used to simulate these improvement techniques to identify the best solutions for the problem. Results showed that improving a 60 cm layer of subgrade soil with quicklime combined with adding a geogrid layer in the middle of the subbase layer gives the best results.

Keywords

• soft clay
• overloading
• quicklime
• geogrid
• plaxis 2d