STUDY OF GEOTECHNICAL BEHAVIOUR OF POND ASH MIXED WITH MARBLE DUST

There are numerous substances that cause air, water and soil pollution, disrupt ecological cycles and set off environmental hazards and one of them is fly ash. Fly ash is the ash produced by burning of pulverized coal in thermal power plants that gets collected at the bottom of furnace as well as in electrostatic precipitators. The high temperature of burning coal turns the clay minerals present in the coal powder into fused fine particles mainly comprising aluminium silicate. Fly ash produced thus possesses both ceramic and pozzolanic properties. It exhibits engineering behavior similar to fine grained soils. It is possible to use fly ash as an alternative to geomaterials. This paper deals with geotechnical characteristics of the pond ashes collected from Badarpur, Dadri and Rajghat Power Plant located in the National Capital Region, Delhi. Since the proposed study is based on the characteristics of pond ashes mixed with another waste - marble dust, another waste, which is generated as a by-product during cutting of marble, hence its properties has also been investigated. The purpose of mixing this admixture with pond ash is to check the strength, deformability, volume stability (shrinking and swelling), permeability, erodibility, durability etc. This paper presents the details of the pond ashes, the experiments carried out to characterize them when mixed with marble dust and the results and discussions