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TECHNICAL PAPER COLLECTOR’S EDITION

the compressive strength of soil-cement blocks. Sr. Author Soils best Soils to be
Earlier studies on soil-cement blocks have clearly no. suited for avoided
indicated that increase in cement content and soil-cement
construction
block density will lead to increase of compressive 5. Bokhari 1. Soils with
strength. Effect of soil grading on compressive (1976) high sand
strength of pressed soil-cement blocks has been content
Dietz
examined in greater detail in this section. 6. (1979) 1. Soils with 1. High clay soils
high sand
content
TEST PROGRAMME 7. Houben 1. Sandy and 1. Soils with clay
and gravelly soils content > 30
Tests were conducted on four local soil samples and Guillaud percent and LL >
(1984) 50 percent
their reconstituted variants. The four soil samples
were designated as BG, SH, ML and BC. Two more 8. Oliver and 1. Soils 1. High clay soils
Mesbah containing 70
soil samples were prepared by mixing two original (1987) percent sand
and 20 percent
soils in different proportions. Reconstituted soil clay
samples have been designated in the following
manner.

MBC: ML SOIL + 50% BC SOIL by weight

SBC: SH SOIL + 20% BC SOIL by weight

Table 1 Summary of earlier studies on soil-
cement

Sr. Author Soils best Soils to be
no. suited for avoided
soil-cement
construction
1. Chaston 1. Sandy and 1. Soils with high
(1952) gravelly soils clay content
with 10 to 35 2. Highly silty
percent silt and soils
clay
2. Sandy soils
with fines
2. Mehra 1. Sandy soils Fig 2 Grain size distribution of sand
and Uppal
(1949·50)
Grain size distribution curves of these soil samples
3. Mitra 1. Sandy soils 1. Soils with high are shown in Fig 1. Table 2 gives engineering
(1951) silt and clay
properties and chemical composition of these soils.
4. Fitzmaurice 1. Soils with Soils BG, SH and ML contain predominantly non-
(1958) less clay
content expansive clay minerals such as kaolinite, whereas
consisting of BC soil contains montmorillonite clay mineral of
mostly sand
and gravel expansive nature. Reconstituted soils (MBC and
2. Soils with LL SBC) contain a mixture of both expansive and non-
< 40 percent expansive clay minerals. Percentages of sand, silt
and P.I. 2.5 and clay size fractions of these six soil samples
to 22

The Indian Concrete Journal | November 2018 63