Improvement of cohesive soils by using stone columns

Abstract

Soil being natural and non-manufactured material has proven itself to be most potentially problematic and complex materials to tackle with. The complexity does not arise only because of soil as a material, but also by the fact that various methods to characterize the soil for estimations of constituents, behavior and strength are potentially difficult. In this paper , a study on the effect of stone columns on the behaviour of cohesive soils has been done, it was found that the installation of the stone columns plays a very significant role in improving the bearing capacity of the cohesive soils. The main improvement in cohesive soils takes place by virtue of densification while inserting the stone column, the increase in drainage also plays a great role. The length of the stone columns was found to greatly influence the behaviour of the improvement of the soils. The improvement is very significant for a length of 1B where B is the width/diameter of the footing.