Clay concrete and effect of clay minerals types on stabilized soft clay soils by epoxy resin

Abstract Clay soils, especially soft clay soils covered considerable parts of the earth. Cement and lime are used as traditional additives for clay soils stabilization but unable to increase the strength properties of clay soils significantly. So, it seems necessary to use new additives to increase the strength parameters of soft clay soils. Therefore, cement and epoxy resin are used for stabilization of soft clay soils in this study. The main objects of this study are the determination of the effect of epoxy resin on the mechanical parameters and microstructure properties of clay soils, the phenomenon of clay concrete and effect of clay minerals on its properties and also, using knowledge of the elastic modulus, toughness and elastic and plastic strain of the stabilized soft clay as a practical criterion for determination of the optimum additive percentage in soft clays stabilization in addition to UCS. In this study, two samples of clay soils with different clay minerals were investigated. Clay soil samples that tested experimentally were bentonite and kaolinite. A series of microstructure and macrostructure experiments were conducted on the samples. The results show that using epoxy resin increases strength parameters about 100 to 1000 times while UCS reaches to more than 50 MPa in some samples based on the clay mineral types in the soils. Unlike the cement concrete, as the strength increases the failure strain and material toughness will increase simultaneously as well. In addition, the important and prominent result of stabilization by epoxy resin is the best efficiency in the weakest and the most sensitive soils.