Application of tire crumbs on mechanical properties of a clayey soil subjected to freeze-thaw cycles

During recent years, processed used tires such as tire shreds, tire chips, tire buffings, and tire crumbs have been applied in order to improve the mechanical properties of soil mixtures. Finding more beneficial ways of using waste tires, this paper assessed the influence of adding tire crumbs to a clayey soil which was affected by freeze-thaw cycles. Freeze-thaw cycling is a weathering process which occurs in cold climates during winter and spring and considerably changes the engineering properties of soils. In the present study, a clayey soil was mixed with six different percentages of tire crumbs (0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5) and evaluated by triaxial compression tests under three different confining pressures (30, 60, 90 kPa) after the soil was subjected to 1, 3, 6, and 9 cycles of freeze-thaw. It has been found that for the investigated soil, using 2.5% of tire crumbs decreases the cohesion reduction ratio by about 24% and the resilient modulus reduction ratio by about 6-42% during the cycles. Hence, although the addition of tire crumbs does not considerably affect the strength reduction of soil during freeze-thaw cycles, it can reduce the changes of cohesion and resilient modulus of the soil, effectively. (C) 2016 Sharif University of Technology. All rights reserved.