Reduction of pavement thickness using a subgrade layer treated by different techniques

A range of stabilisers for poor quality subgrade soils have been developed to promote road constructions. Many of them are becoming more popular depending on their effectiveness. The purpose behind this research is to identify the relative efficacy of many physical and chemical stabilisation techniques for enhancing the properties of three types of local Iraqi subgrade soils. The comparison of the samples is based on the CBR tests. The AASHTO (1993) flexible pavement design was used to compute the pavement thickness requirements. The soil samples A, B and C have a natural CBR values of 3.8, 3.9 and 4, respectively, on which the physical stabilisers of Powdered rock (PR), grained recycled concrete (GRC), and recycled crumb rubber grains (CR) were employed, while Quicklime (QL) and activated fly ash (AFA) were both utilised as chemical stabilisers. The stabilisation with 15 % of AFA proved to be the most applicable method for soil types A and B for reducing the pavement thickness requirements by 51 % and 32 %, respectively, with a reasonable financial feasibility for both. The same feasibility is proven when stabilising soil type C with 15 % of GRC, which reduces the pavementthickness by 25.7 %.