ResearchArticle
An Experimental Study on Unconfined Compressive Strength of
SoftSoil-CementMixtureswithorwithoutGGBFSintheCoastal
Area of Vietnam
Son Bui Truong ,NuNguyenThi ,andDuongNguyenThanh
HanoiUniversityofMiningandGeology,No.18VienStreet,DucangWard,BacTuLiemDistrict,Hanoi,Vietnam
Correspondence should be addressed to Son Bui Truong; buitruongson@humg.edu.vn
Received 15 January 2020; Revised 6 June 2020; Accepted 13 June 2020; Published 30 June 2020
Academic Editor: Li Li
Copyright © 2020 Son Bui Truong et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Soft soil is widely distributed in Vietnam, especially in the coastal area. In engineering practice, soft soil cannot be used to build
any construction and needs to be improved or treated before building construction. In addition, Vietnam has many pig-iron or
thermal power plants, which annually produce a huge amount of granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS). us, the use of this
material for soft soil improvement needs to be considered. is paper presents experimental results on the unconfined com-
pressive strength (UCS) of three Vietnam’s soft soils treated with Portland cement and Portland cement with ground granulated
blast furnace slag (GGBFS). Binder dosage used in this study is 250, 300, and 350 kg/m
3
with the three different water/cement
ratios of 0.8, 0.9, and 1.0, respectively. e research results showed that the UCS of soil-cement mixtures depends on soil type,
water/cement ratio, cement type, and binder content. Accordingly, the unconfined compressive strength increased with the
increase of binder contents, the decrease of the natural water content of soft soil, water/cement ratios, and clay content. e
highest value of UCS of treated soils was found for the soil at Site II with the Portland cement content, cement GGBFS, and water/
cement ratio of 873 kg/m
3
,2355kg/m
3
, and 0.8, respectively. Besides, for all the three soils and two binder types, the water/cement
ratio of 0.8 was found to be suitable to reach the highest UCS values of treated soil. e research results also showed that the UCS
of treated soil with cement GGBFS was higher than that of treated soil with Portland cement. is indicated the effectiveness of the
use of Portland cement with GGBFS in soft soil improvement. ere is great potential for reducing the environmental problems
regarding the waste materials from pig-iron plants in Vietnam and the construction cost as well.
1.Introduction
Vietnam is one of the countries with a long coastline of more
than 3000km [1]. Plains are distributed along the coastline
and formed by sedimentation from many rivers such as Red,
ai Binh, Ma, Dong Nai, and Mekong. e stratigraphy of
these deltas is very complicated and is formed in the Ho-
locene age, that is, young sediments. ese sediments are
mainly in soft to very soft state and often make an unfa-
vorable condition for construction activities [1–6]. Recently,
the demand for infrastructure development in Vietnam is on
the rise. us, there is great attention to the areas with poor
soil conditions. However, the soil in these areas needs to be
improved before building construction. So far, one of the
methods that are commonly used for the improvement of
soft soil in Vietnam is cement deep mixing (CDM) method
[7–11]. is method has been also widely used in the world,
especially in southeast Asian countries [12].
Regarding the use of cement for soil improvement, some
main properties of soil-cement mixtures, including the
unconfined compressive strength, the elastic modulus (E
50
),
small-strain shear modulus, and strain-dependent shear
stiffness, have been widely investigated [12–19]. e un-
confined compressive strength (UCS) is one of the most
important strength parameters of cement-stabilized soils
and has received much attention from the literature
[15–17, 20–25]. Abbey et al. [24] indicated that UCS is the
most essential parameter to design the cut-off walls for the
Hindawi
Advances in Civil Engineering
Volume 2020, Article ID 7243704, 12 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/7243704