Study in laboratory of treatment with cement of silty material: improvement of the mechanical properties

The addition of the agent of treatment allows to obtain a better traficability and improves the capacity of the soil to compaction while assuring a correct implementation. Besides, the binder provides to the soil a direct, maintained, or increasing lift at the same time. The choice of the agent of treatment and its dosage is determined by the type of soil, its moisture content at the time of the treatment, and by the aimed characteristics. The technique of treatment of soil in place in the hydraulic binders consists in valuing the natural soil (existing at the site of construction) by mixing them with a hydraulic binder and some water. It allows to avoid the transport and implies their stabilization in very interesting costs before the implementation of the superficial layers. In this context, this paper presents the results of the shear strength parameters of a study in laboratory with the aim of using the fine soil, in particular an Algerian western resulting silt, after a treatment with the cement by dry mixing method. Our goal is to realize pavement structures (base layer and subgrade layer) with this material. This type of treatment requires to know well the material which we wish to treat. A geotechnical complete characterization before treatment is approached on samples compacted in different water content, followed by the study of the influence of the addition of 2, 4, and 6 % cement on the characteristics of portance and of strength to shearing. Shear test was performed after curing the samples for 24 h to evaluate the shear strength parameters. The obtained results highlight a clearly better and marked improvement of the characteristics such as the lift and the strength to shearing.     

Paraxial approximation for poroelastic media

Amongst different existing techniques developed for absorbing boundaries in transient dynamic analysis, the paraxial approximation represents an elegant framework. This approach is extended to the case of saturated porous media, which is of vital interest in many earthquake engineering problems. With respect to the frequency content of the dynamic process, several formulations exist for modelling the two-phase behaviou of soil or rock materials. The existence of a shear wave and two dilatational waves, which are standard features of porous media, is verified for the adopted formulation. The paraxial approximation is presented in the case of the u – p Biot two-phase dynamic formulation, suitable for seismic analyses and implemented by using a finite element approach. The efficiency of these boundaries is further verified through same numerical examples.