Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Vahedifard, Farshid

Committee Member

Howard, Isaac L.

Committee Member

Gude, Veera Gnaneswar

Committee Member

Freyne, Seamus

Date of Degree

12-9-2016

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Major

Civil Engineering

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D)

College

James Worth Bagley College of Engineering

Department

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Abstract

Sustainable geotechnics warrants exploring beneficial reuse of the large volume of fine grained soils which are produced annually in various forms such as dredged soils and mine tailings. Often these soils are at very high moisture content, and are therefore referred to herein as VHMS for Very High Moisture Soils. These soils exhibit poor engineering properties such as low shear strength and high compressibility. This dissertation presents results from experiments conducted primarily to assess geotechnical properties over time of lightly cemented VHMS (referred to as LC-VHMS and defined as 5% or less cement by slurry mass). The main objectives of this dissertation are to show that very high moisture dredged soils can be stabilized with low dosages of portland limestone cement (PLC) or ordinary portland cement (OPC) to achieve useful properties for some beneficial reuse applications such as filling geotextile tubes. This dissertation’s efforts differ from other dredged soil stabilization efforts due to lower cement dosages and property comparisons between traditionally used OPC and the more sustainable PLC. Several different combinations of moisture content, cement type, and cement content were prepared and tested over time on dredged soils collected from disposal facilities near the ports of Memphis and Mobile. The experiment results indicate that meaningful shear strength improvements were sometimes observed, and pozzolanic strength gain tendencies were documented, which supported the position that LC-VHMS, especially with PLC, is sustainable and can achieve suitable engineering properties for some beneficial reuse applications.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/20364

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