Mechanical Properties of Lightweight Treated Soil Cured in Water Pressure

An artificial lightweight soil has been developed as a backfill to reduce the earth pressure behind port and harbor structures. To reduce the unit weight lightening ingredient such as air foam or EPS beads is mixed within slurry of dredged soft clay, while cement is used as stabilizer to warrant compressive strength. This experimental study aims to characterize the strength and deformation properties of lightweight treated soil cured in water pressure. Samples of two types of lightweight treated soil mixed with air foam or EPS were cured under various pressures, and subjected to undrained shearing tests on triaxial apparatus modified to detect volumetric change. Though high pressures inevitably compress lightener and consequently incur increment in unit weight, pressured curing did not reduce the compressive strength, q_max = (σ_a-σ_c)_max. It was also found that the deformation modulus E₅₀ greatly decreases with relative confining pressure σ_c/q_max. The lightweight soils maintained relatively large residual strengths, showing no significant sign of brittle failure as often confronted in unconfined compression test. It was observed that the critical state line exists when subjected to ultimate strains, and that the peak deviator stress envelop was identified in effective stress path plane for air foam mixed cases alone. K₀-consolidation tests were conducted on modified triaxial apparatus, showing that K₀ values from the quasi one dimensional tests decline to as small as 0.1 to 0.15 around axial strain of 0.5~1% at near yielding points. Poisson's ratios based on both undrained shearing and K₀-consolidation are compared in consistent tendency with minimal values of 0.1 to 0.2 near the identical yielding points. Yet it is revealed from the obtained compression curves that the compressibility increases drastically by some 100-fold when comparing before and after yielding for lightweight treated soil. This fact strikes the importance of not overloading lightweight treated soil by its compressive strength.