COMPARISON OF UCS TEST WITH ELECTROKINETIC (EK) TREATMENT FOR STRENGTH DEVELOPMENT OF REINFORCED PEAT-POLYESTER FIBER

Peat is described as the separated soil material which consists mainly of high organic substance derived primarily from plant material. This soil is characterised by its very high moisture content, high compressibility and a very low shear strength. Consequently, these characteristics lead to the difficulties in the construction in many aspects including preconstruction difficulty, post construction failures, construction cost, maintenance issues, and short and long term impacts. Nowadays, the demand for utilising the peat land for construction has been rapidly increasing due to rise in population growth as well as various economic reasons. Knowing this, it becomes vital to find a solution to improve the peat strength. In this study, the peat soil strength is to be improved by mixing with chemical stabiliser (Ordinary Portland Cement) and tyre waste product (Polyester Fiber), with and without electrokinetic (EK) treatment. The main focus of this project is to compare the strength development of the peat samples, before and after stabilisation and EK treatment, and to identify the optimum design mixture based on the maximum peat strength obtained from Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) results. The peat soil used in this research was collected from Kampung Endap while the fiber material was obtained from ZHA Environmental Sdn Bhd. OPC was readily prepared in the Geotechnical Laboratory. Peat soil collected from the mentioned location was classified as highly decomposed peat (H7) in accordance to Von Post Scale of Humification. The moisture content recorded for the peat samples was 425%, indicating that the presence of water in the peat soil was extremely greater. The highlight for this project was the UCS test where the peat samples were first mixed with 3 different percentages of polyester fiber – 0.3%, 0.5% and 0.8%, and 5% cement addition (constant). All 68 samples were left for 0 day, 7 days, 14 days and 28 days of curing. The application of EK treatment was practised with 3.0 V applied for 10 minutes duration by using a simple electric circuit. For 0 and 7 days of curing, it was noticed that the mixture with 0.3% fiber inclusion contributed the highest UCS strength with the application of EK, giving the UCS values of 110.41 kPa and 116.86 kPa, respectively. Meanwhile, for 14 and 28 days of curing, the mixture of 0.8% fiber inclusion with EK treatment gave the highest UCS values that were 115.06 kPa and 140.63 kPa, respectively