Investigating and studying the effect of Montmorillonite Nanoclay on consolidation and strength behavior of loose and soft fine-grained soil (Case study: fine-grained soil of Kermanshah Faculty of Agriculture)

Using new and environmentally friendly materials to stabilize problematic soils is one of the challenges facing geotechnical engineers. Nanoclays are highly reactive due to their high specific surface area, low specific gravity, fine particles, and are also considered as an effective and environmentally friendly stabilizer due to their uniformity with soil materials. In the present study, the effect of Nanoclay on the behavioral properties of Kermanshah's clay fine-grained soil has been evaluated. For this purpose, after having conducted index and identification tests on the natural soil, Nanoclay was added to the studied soil with 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 percent by weight of the dry soil, and Atterberg, consolidation, unconfined compressive strength and California bearing ratio tests were conducted on these samples in curing periods 1, 14, 28 and 60 days. Also, the durability of the stabilized samples was investigated by applying wet-dry cycles, and to investigate the effect of Nanoclay on the soil microstructure, imaging was captured from unstabilized and stabilized samples by scanning electron microscopy. The results show that the stabilization performance is significantly dependent on the amount of Nanoclay and curing periods. Also, according to the results, the optimal amount of Nanoclay is 4%, and the presence of this amount of Nanoclay and increasing curing periods has increased the plastic index, compressive strength and soil bearing ratio and decreased the coefficient of consolidation, settlement, Compression, permeability, and soil swelling. It is noteworthy that soil durability against environmental conditions has also increased.