Effect of Nano-Carbon on Geotechnics Features of Gypseous Soils

Abstract

A Collapsing soil usually causes problems, this kind of soil has a substantial strength while it is dry, but it loses its strength while inundating and be subjected to extreme settlement. It is impossible to predict in advance the reactions of soils subjected to inundating (i.e. landslide otherwise an important soil settlement). The reduction in irreversible volumes of collapsing soil happens quickly as well as suddenly, once the reduction starts there will be no measurement to be executed which could halt such difficulty. As a result of the soak and leach that are resulting from the dissolute and clean out of gypsum, the collapsing potentials increase during the time. There are many studies in this field that indicated the possibility of modifying this soil by using nanomaterials. In this study, the nanomaterial used is nanocarbon and the soil is gypseous soil taken from Al-Najaf city in Iraq. This work studies the effect of adding nanomaterials on the gypseous soil and investigates its behavior before and after adding nanomaterial. The results showed that adding the nanocarbon affects the collapse potential which decreases by a percent meanwhile the soil cohesion decreased partly when the nanocarbon is added with 0.8% but the friction angle increased about 19%. The best proportion of using of the nanocarbon ranges between 0.8-1.2%.