Design Approach for Construction of Rural Roads Using Nanomaterial-Stabilized Soil

Rural roads are an important part of the world’s transportation infrastructure as they provide connectivity to the major roads and highways. Long-term performance of pavement structures is significantly impacted by enhancement in the stability of the underlying soils. Conventionally, most of the rural roads are composed of compacted sub-grade layer. On the other hand, for higher volume road design, soil subgrades are expected to maintain load bearing strength under wet conditions, resist the weathering effect over its design life, and reduce permeability. The main objective of this research is to improve the strength of the sub-grade, which helps to construct stabilized gravel road for low volume traffic and reduce the crust thickness of the pavement layers of higher traffic volume using soil stabilized with nanomaterials and cement. In this article, performance improvement and improved design of a rural road using nanomaterials along with cement combination is presented. Results showed that clayey sand (SC) treated with nanomaterials have beneficial effects on their engineering properties, increased strength and stiffness, and enhanced durability. By using a combination of nanomaterials and cement, the California Bearing Ratio (CBR) of the soil increased to 18 times the original CBR and also improved the unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and durability of the soil. On the basis of these results, an improved design approach for low traffic and high traffic volume roads was done, and it is suggested that reduction in the crust thickness of the pavement layers is possible by using stabilized soil, and only stabilized gravel roads can be constructed for low traffic volume or rural roads.