Stabilization of Expansive Soil with Polyvinyl Alcohol and Potassium Carbonate

Expansive soils have great volume change potentials with water content changes, which is problematic to facilities. Great efforts have been spent on finding proper methods to stabilize expansive soils, but these stabilizers all had limitations. The Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and K₂CO₃combination was proposed in this paper. Free swell tests, oedometric tests, unconfined compression tests, and direct shear tests were performed to investigate the effectiveness of the PVA and K₂CO₃combination to control the volume change and increase the soil strength. Microstructures of the natural expansive soil and the stabilized soil were also studied with SEM photos. SEM photos showed a homogenous and dense microstructure after stabilization. In addition, a laboratory soil column model was built to study the ability of this stabilizer combination to stabilize expansive soils by directly spraying the solution on the ground surface. All these test results show that the combination of PVA and K₂CO₃is able to effectively stabilize the natural expansive soil and increase the shear strength. It is possible to directly spray the stabilizer solution on the soil surface to form a relatively thick layer of the stabilized expansive soil.

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