Durability and Swelling of Solidified/Stabilized Dredged Marine Soils with Class-F Fly Ash, Cement, and Lime

Abstract

Very few studies have been carried out to investigate the durability and swelling behavior of dredged marine materials. To tackle this issue, this study mainly considers the influence of water immersion and thawing-freezing on the stress-strain characteristics and swelling property of 16 designed soil mixes with cement, lime, and Class-F fly ash. The unconfined compressive strength, failure strain, deformation modulus, and their quantitative corelationships are discussed in detail to evaluate the mechanical performance of stabilized materials damaged by water immersion and thawing-freezing. The result reveals that binder type and binder content have an important influence on the position and shape of stress-strain curves, compressive strength, deformation modulus, failure strain, and failure mode. The derived relationships between unconfined compressive strength and deformation modulus/failure strain are quantified, taking into account ageing effects. To quantitatively estimate the strength degradation, a coefficient of strength loss is defined for evaluating the effect of thawing-freezing and water immersion on compressive strength. Moreover, three-stage modes are proposed for depicting satisfactorily the stress-strain curves and swelling-time curves. A combination of relative swelling percent and absolute swelling amount, which can be reduced by chemical stabilization, is used to reasonably describe the swelling potential of stabilized soils.