A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CONVENTIONAL AND ALTERNATE BINDERS FOR SOILS STABILIZED USING FULL DEPTH RECLAMATION TECHNIQUE

Abstract

With the road infrastructure boom our country is getting into, there is a need to maintain and rehabilitate the existing infrastructure in a sustainable and cost-effective way. With shrinking capital and cost escalations, the need of the hour is to recycle and recapitalize the investments made already in decades old pavements. Sustainable engineering solutions, like Full Depth Reclamation (FDR) may be an answer to deliver high quality infrastructure with greener and cost-efficient methods. Commonly, the mix design for stabilized FDR is formulated on the basis of physical and mechanical properties of the material determined by performing tests on properly compacted and cured samples of the mix. 7/28 day UCS, Dry density, Flexure strength and Moisture Content results are considered, however, durability analysis based on Wetting-Drying or Freeze-Thaw test is conveniently omitted by the researchers. These laborious testing procedures require an extensive time of 32 days and have inherent variability based on the user. Due to this, the researcher tends to base their findings only on the basis of UCS strength and overcompensate skipping of durability by suggesting higher dosage of stabilizer. However, higher dosage of stabilizer may lead to excessive shrinkage cracking as brought out in multiple literature, which may ultimately lead to premature failure of the pavement. Therefore, a need was felt for an alternate durability test which could address the shortcomings and predict the durability with reasonable accuracy. Vacuum Saturation test has been considered a viable alternative due to it’s relatively simple and cost-effective test methodology which could produce results in 3 hours after 7 day curing period. However, limited research work has been done on the subject with focus only on establishing a relation between Freeze-Thaw mass loss after 12 cycles with Vacuum saturation. Attempt has been made through this research to establish a relationship between 7 Day UCS, Vacuum Saturation residual strength, Wetting-Drying residual strength and Freeze-Thaw residual strength. Statistical analysis predict a strong relation between these parameters.