Tag Archives: Soil Stabilization

Lime is a natural stabilizer: It prepares the soil for construction works

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Soil stabilizers convert apparently less bearing ground into highly suitable one for starting construction work like pavements, road beds, basement of canals, water reservoir, etc. Soil stabilizationis the method of strengthening the ground through pulverization and moisture conditioning. This job is efficiently done with different forms of lime and then compaction and trimming as necessary. This process improves the basic characteristics of soil that makes it suitable for a construction project. Lime is used in different percentage depending on the soil condition to adjust the parameters like moisture, density, plasticity, permeability, strength, etc.

Benefits of soil stabilization

Soil stabilization with lime before starting any construction work has the following benefits:

  • Apparently wet soil that is not suitable for construction work can be made suitable within one or two days.
  • Treatment with lime ensures production of long-lasting stable jobs comparable with graded aggregates.
  • The soil becomes hard wearing with greater toughness and strength that make it extremely suitable for a construction process.
  • It enables recycling ofinsitu materials and existing soil that ultimately provides financial benefits to the contractor or owner of the land. It takes less time to prepare the soil as also saves expenses in labor, transportation, and import of aggregates.
  • Soil stabilization with lime also reduces PI (Plasticity Index) of the existing soil significantly.
  • The ground gains strength significantly that is found to be more than 15% as per CBR test.
  • This process of soil stabilization is environmental-friendly too. The process requires very small quantities of other additives making less transportation of materials, less disturbance in busy areas, and lesser use of factory made binders.

 

Lime efficiently stabilizes weak soil

Use of lime as a stabilizer for road beds has been in practice over the century. Modern research works have proved behind doubt that lime can also be used for stabilizing the soil in the large construction sites. Lime is especially useful when expansive clay is present is a construction site. Expansive clays destabilize the base work and change the orientation of the concrete slabs with time. Whereas the soil treated with lime can solve the issue permanently. Lime actually performs a chemical stabilization process where the added lime compound reacts with the clay present in a ground in the following ways:

  • When lime is mixed with the soil, the clay particles come together forming stiffer silt, and reducing plasticity of the soil.
  • After the compaction job, life further reacts with the soil particles binding them firmly and increasing their strength.

Quicklime for soil stabilization in construction works

Many types of lime compounds are available, but quick lime or calcium oxide is mainly used for this work. Quicklime reacts with soil water forming calcium hydroxide which again reacts with some existing minerals like silica and alumina initiating an ionic exchange reaction forming a cement-like product naturally. In this reaction, called pozzolanic reaction, cannot retain water particles anymore and with the passage of time, it hardens like cement. Thus, quicklime provides the required stability to the soil.

 

Soil Stabilization- Cat Mixer

When you need to build real solid house, roads, offices etc. you need to believe in the best soil stabilizing machine. It is the soil stabilizer that plays an instrumental role in giving the solid shape to your houses or to the pavements or anything that you see that involves cement. Earlier in most of the developed countries, soil stabilizing machines were not used to make roads. However, now it has become a common practice and you can see soil stabilizer being used everywhere where people are constructing roads. It increases the power of the soil and cement to up to 6 times or ever more than that thus giving a solid shape to the roads. This is why we see the roads to be in shape for a pretty long time. The amount of traffic that moves on the roads on a daily basis is immense and one can easily make out how solid the roads have to be to take the entire load daily.

Nowadays, construction companies that take up work to develop roads make use of green technologies like co-polymer based products, synthetic polymers, tree resins, calcium chloride, calcite etc. By using these techniques, it actually prevents the water to reach the treated layer thus ensuring that the life of the road is lengthened and also the cost is minimized. Some of the companies that manufacture soil stabilizing machines are CAT, Terex, etc. However, the one that has shown incredible sale in the last few years in the one produced by CAT.

 

The CAT Ss-250 and RM 300 are few of the much known brands that have been the eye candy of most of the construction companies. The RM 300 is compatible with both depth reclamation and soil stabilization. It has been installed with sliding operator’s station, automatic depth control, pressurized cab etc. It is perhaps the one that has been fitted with many instrumental features that one may find quite significant to use. The rear wheels in the machine can be driven by a separate hydraulic pump. This is done to give more tractive effort.

Though Cat soil stabilizers quite expensive but a must in almost every construction site. The companies who do not compromise on the quality of their construction unarguably go for mixers made by CAT. Other companies are also good in terms of quality. However, it may be not as user friendly as one can experience with CAT stabilizers. Therefore, it has been the most preferred machine by countless of small as well as big construction and mining companies.

If one needs to buy a CAT stabilizer, he/she can do it by directly contacting the company or can find it easily on internet. Buying it on internet will give him a lot of options and also at a price that he may not find anywhere else. He can also opt for bank loan or finance to buy the machine. So money will not be an obstacle when it comes to the overall growth of the business.