Stabilization of expansive soil for highway embankment: a critical review

Abstract

Road transportation is the most common and economical mode of transportation because of its easy accessibility. Hence, a stable road network plays a key role in the country’s development. However, we frequently observe a lot of failures in pavement such as cracking, rutting, heaving, and differential settlement of pavement panels. One of the major reasons for the above failures is lack of stability in embankments. Thus, selection of suitable embankment soil is very much essential. Due to increasing cost and demand, there is a lack of suitable soil. The selection of weak and problematic soils leads to a series of problems because of their low shear strength, low permeability, low bearing capacity, high swelling, high compressibility, etc. Further their behavior under dynamic loading conditions such as traffic, earthquake, and dynamic liquefaction is questionable. Expansive soil is a widely available problematic soil all over the earth. Hence stabilization of embankments is required with the usage of expansive soil. Currently, expansive soil is stabilized with cement, lime, fly ash, enzymes, slag, geosynthetics, polymers, industrial waste, etc. In this review, existing stabilization methods on expansive soil are described and the need for further research is discussed.