Experimental Study On The Influence Factors Of Strength Behavior Of Cement Stabilized Clay At High Water Content

An ideal solution for disposal of large volumes of high water content clays is to stabilize by low amount of cement(referred to as HW-LC-clay from hereon) and use them as fill materials for land reclamations. The strength behavior of HW-LC-clay is evidently different from that of traditional cement-treated clays because of its high water content and low cement dosage. Generally, large volumes of HW-LC-clay are used as fill materials. This can cause higher curing temperature and curing stress due to its hydration heat and thicker layers respectively. Obviously, the existence of curing temperature and curing stress make the traditional empirical formulas no longer applicable. Therefore, it is necessary to study the influence factors of the strength behavior of HW-LC-clay.In this study, several sets of laboratory tests are first conducted to acquire the unconfined compressive strength of different HW-LC-clay samples with different mixing proportions. The effects of water content and cement content on the strength development of HW-LC-clay are investigated by using the normalization approach. Then, the strength of HW-LC-clay samples with different curing stress are also tested. The ratio of after-curing void ratio to cement content and effective void ratio are adopted respectively to describe the effect of curing stress. Finally, a series of laboratory tests are conducted to acquire strength development curves of HW-LC-clay with different curing temperatures. The influencing mechanisms of curing temperature to strength development are studied respectively for diffierent types of cemented materials, which are from the pervious literature datasets. The conclusions obtained from this study are as following:(1) The strength of HW-LC-clay increase as the decreasing of water content with a nonlinear trend, and as the increasing of cement content with a nonlinear trend. Water content and cement content should be considered as two separate parameters governing the strength behavior of HW-LC-clay.(2) The curing stress has a significant impact to strength of HW-LC-clay. The strength present a one-to-one correspondence exponential relationship with after-curing void ratio to cement content(or effective void ratio). However, using after-curing void ratio to cement content and effective void ratio to describe the effect of curing stress is unreasonable.(3) The influence of curing temperature to strength development is significant different to diffierent types of cemented materials, including concrete material, cement stabilized marine clay and cement stabilized organic clay.