Effect of Wet-Dry Cycles on Mechanical Strength Properties of Cement Stabilized Granular Lateritic Soil

Scarcity of good quality stone aggregates has been posing a major challenge in sustainable development of roads in many developing countries including India. Granular lateritic soil is marginal material abundantly available in major parts of India and this needs to be stabilized for use in base and subbase layers. Traditionally durability is assessed through wet-dry durability test, where the specimens are subjected to alternate wetting and drying cycles, which is believed to simulate the natural weathering conditions. This work presented in this paper reports the effect of wet-dry (W-D) cycles on unconfined compressive strength (UCS), flexural strength (FS) and flexural modulus (FM) of a cement stabilized granular lateritic soil (CLS) collected from the eastern part of India. The strength and stiffness of CLS was found to be increasing with the number of durability cycles. This trend of increasing strength and stiffness is contradicting the general assumption that the W-D process reduces the material integrity and this may be attributed to the accelerated curing due to heating of samples, which negated the detrimental effect of wetting and also due to gradual strength gain with blended cements.