A Study on the Effectiveness on the Polyethylene Strips in Cement-Treated Soil

This paper presents the study conducted on the locally available clayey soil using plastic strips with and without cement. Low-density polyethylene obtained from shopping bags was cut into strips of aspect ratio (AR) 4 and 2 (length/width ratio). The plastic strips were uniformly mixed in the soil sample by adding 1, 2, and 3% by weight of the soil. The samples were tested for unconfined compression test. In order to compare the improvement in strength of the soil, a constant value of 2% cement was added along with the plastic strips. The cement-treated samples were cured for a period of 7, 14, 21, and 28 days prior to testing. The test results for untreated and treated soil samples with and without cement were compared. The samples treated with plastic strips showed slight improvement in the UCS values on comparison to the cement-treated soil samples. A maximum of 10 fold and 18-fold increase in the UCS values compared to untreated soils were observed for soil samples treated with plastic strips of AR2 and AR4, respectively. Similarly, the cement-treated soils showed better results than the soils without cement treatment. The UCS values of cement-treated soil samples was found to be 28-fold and 32-fold for AR2 and AR4, respectively.