Randomly Reinforced Fly Ash as Embankment Material

Fly ash, an environmentally hazardous solid waste is produced mostly from the burning of coal in thermal power plants. Due to continuous and high volume of material it requires, the road construction industry is often looked upon as a potential consumer of fly ash. The strength of fly ash has to be improved before it can be used as embankment material. The present paper investigates the possible utilization of randomly reinforced fly ash in embankment construction. This paper presents the results of laboratory investigation carried on randomly reinforced fly ash. Polypropylene fibers with different fiber length (6mm, 12mm and 24 mm) are used as reinforcement. Fly ash is compacted at maximum dry density with low percentage of reinforcement (0 to 1.50 % of weight of dry fly ash).Unconfined Compression Strength (UCS) tests and California Bearing Ratio (CBR) tests were conducted on unreinforced as well as reinforced fly ash samples to investigate behavior of fiber reinforced fly ash. The test results reveal that the inclusion of fibers in fly ash increases the UCS and CBR values. It is noticed that the optimum fiber content for achieving maximum strength is 1.00 % by dry weight of fly ash with a fibers having length 12 mm.