Efficacy of Industrial By-product and Hybrid Fibers as Additives for Enriched Subgrade Characteristics of Expansive Soil

Abstract

Industrial by-products find enormous application in soil engineering. Many researchers used industrial by-products, fibers (Natural and artificial) and cement in isolation. In addition, as the demand of good subgrade material increases, more varieties of by-products and the fibers would evolve. Geosynthetic reinforced soil model may not provide generalized performance for all varieties of fibers and the predicted bearing resistance may not be continuous over the entire range of soils. Artificial fibers last long but require hydrocarbons in their manufacture, while the natural fibers do not satisfy long-term serviceability conditions. Our attempt through this project is to evolve innovative hybrid fibre (HF), a combination of natural, artificial fibers and industrial by-product that will result into a composite material with reduced use of artificial fibers without compromising on the enhanced strength, and bearing properties. The experimental results with 0.2% hybrid fibers embedded within the expansive soil treated with 20% industrial by-product are compared with the behaviour of unreinforced, unaltered expansive soil and they observed to be in a good correlation with the investigational records obtained from the literature.