Design Guide Soft Soil Stabilisation
This Design Guide for deep soil stabilisation of soft organic soils deals with all the aspects of the application of column and mass stabilisation. The Design Guide is a description of the best practice, mainly based on the experiences at seven test sites of the European project EuroSoilStab. This project is executed in the period February 1997 until September 2000. The test sites were located in Finland (2), Sweden (2), United Kingdom (1) and the Netherlands (2).
- Julkaisutyyppi:
- Guide
- Julkaisija:
- EuroSoilStab -project
- Julkaistu:
- 2001
Deep stabilisation is a method to stabilise soft soils by adding dry or wet binders in order to reduce settlements and/or to improve the stability of embankments for roads and railroads. The soil under the embankment can be stabilised either by forming columns of stabilised soil (so-called column stabilisation) or by stabilising the entire soil volume (so-called mass stabilisation). Deep stabilisation can be applied for the stabilisation of various types of soil. In Europe deep stabilisation of soft nonorganic soils with lime and cement columns has been used in Sweden and Finland for more then 20 years for reduction of settlements and improvement of stability of embankments.
In order to be able to stabilise organic soils like organic clay, gyttja and peat research and
development was needed. A consortium of companies and organisations from England, Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden has executed a research and development program supported by the European Commission under the Brite-EuRam program of the 4th Framework Program. The acronym of this project was EuroSoilStab. The full tittle: Development of design and construction methods to stabilise soft organic soils for the construction of rail, road and other infrastructure.
In the project full-scale tests are executed in several countries. Column and mass stabilisations are designed and constructed. Embankments are built on top of the stabilisation and the settlements and deformations are monitored to compare with the predicted values. Existing equipment is further developed to cope with wider and deeper columns. Quality control systems are developed and tested on the test sites. New combinations of binders are developed and tested in the laboratory and used for
the full-scale tests. All results are combined in this Design Guide.
The EuroSoilStab project has proven that soft organic soils can be stabilised. Organic clay and gyttja gave good results. Peat with high water content asks for special attention. Adding sand to the mix of binders will improve the results. The type and amount of binders can be based on the information given in the Design Guide, but field trials are always needed for the final construction of the stabilisation.