Comparative Study of Strength Characteristics of Clayey Soil Mixed with Natural and Synthetic Fibers

Soil reinforcement is nowadays an important method of improving ground by enhancing the properties of the in situ soil. Sometimes, soils available near the construction site is not strong and improving such soils will be beneficial for the project. Reinforcing such soils either by synthetic or natural fiber is a technique to improve the strength of such soils (Maity et al. in Proceedings of Indian geotechnical conference, Delhi, pp 285–288 (2012) [2]). However, each day millions of plastic bags of cement or jute bags of food grains are released to the market and disposal of such bags after use generally forms a part of solid waste requiring disposal. However, such bags can be gainfully used in improving soil properties by random mixing for compaction (Santoni et al. in J Transp Eng 127:96–104 (2001) [1]), thereby causing gainful disposal of such materials and simultaneously improving soil properties at a low cost. In view of large scale infrastructure development and wide spread rural road construction in India, such use may be very welcome. Aiming this an experimental program of testing local fine-grained soil, randomly mixed with plastic cement bags and jute bags cut in square shape of varying sizes and mixed with soil in various percentages was made for finding compaction characteristics and California bearing ratio values at optimum moisture content to estimate the improvement of these properties over those of virgin soil. Results of these tests are reported in this paper.