STRENGTH AND COMPRESSIBILITY BEHAVIOUR OF CEMENTED SANDY CLAY

Abstract

This study seeks to understand the effect of sand on the matrix of cemented clays. Since there are no proper guidelines for mix design regarding cemented sandy clay from literature, the thesis starts by examining three conceptual case studies, to arrive at a suitable procedure for analysing cemented binary mixtures. It is shown that the common use of the conventional definition of water content (water/solids) and cement content (cement/solids) for cemented sandy clay results in a decrease in strength and stiffness with increase in sand content. Also, at higher sand contents, bleeding and segregation occurred during the mixing process. A new mix design approach is proposed in this study, which ensures that the effect of sand alone can be captured when studying the behaviour of cemented sandy clay. Through unconfined compressive strength (UCS) tests and bender element (BE) tests, it is shown that the binding water content, modified cement content and water-to-cement ratio are three parameters that play critical roles in defining the strength and small strain stiffness of cemented sandy clay.