Application of polystyrene and cementitious material as lightweight fill for road embankment

• Main Author: Nur Nimatul Ain Rasid
• Format: Academic Exercise
• Language: English; English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: TE200-205 Materials for roadmaking
• Online Access: https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/35173/1/24%20PAGES.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/35173/2/FULLTEXT.pdf; https://eprints.ums.edu.my/id/eprint/35173/

Embankment can be explained by the increasement in height of the newly built roads from the original level. Embankment fill is known as the selected fill materials that are placed and compacted to reduce the load on the foundation which is subgrade soils. However, due to the poor geotechnical of soil properties causing settlement and shear failure. So, surveying site location is important to understand the soil type at the site location. In addition, soil failure affected the road condition and leading flooding during heavy rain and height decreasing by the surcharge load applied on it. Thus, the application of polystyrene and cementitious materials is one of the technique to improve the stability of road embankments. There are four aim as a target to complete this project which two of them is to determine the soil type that is used in the project by doing some experiments is sieve analysis and Atterberg limits and determine the optimum content of polystyrene and cementitious material in soil mixed sample. The significant study of this project is reducing the soil density, improving the slope stability of embankment and preventing landslides to happen. On top of that, the scope of work of this project is to explained the objective that is made. The experiment conducted on Faculty of Engineering University Malaysia Sabah and the listed test is sieve analysis, Atterberg limit, compaction test, unconfined compressive test, and California bearing test. Next, the literature review are discussing the soil classification using USCS also the effectiveness of using geobeads and Portland cement to the soil mixture presented by the previous study. As for the methodology, the flow chart is shown in this chapter. Then, the percentage of geobeads used is 0%,5% and 15% and Portland cement is 8% and 15%. The procedure for conducting the listed experiment is also included in this chapter. In the conclusion, chapter four listed the expected outcomes and work progress are mentioned. As for the standard proctor test for the addition of the polystyrene and cementitious materials have reduce the overburden stress which is up to 35.14%. As this compressive strength it decrease with the increases of the polystyrene beads into the soil mixture. CBR value obtained from the data are passing the requirement and higher value, the lightweight fill which is polystrene beads and Portland cement can be used as alternative materials. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) it can be concluded that the experiment made before testing out using this software found out not very effective since the addition of the proposed polsytrene beads are not considerable. However, the optimum value for this experiment are obtained by using this software hence it can helps the future research to use this data for silimar problem in this project.