Cyclic behavior of cement-stabilized sabkha soil

Cement stabilization is one of the chemical stabilization techniques carried out to improve sabkha soil engineering properties. Cement can be mixed with sabkha at natural water content. However, there is a lack of information concerning the dynamic properties of cemented sabkha. Therefore, this study’s primary purpose is to determine the dynamic properties of cemented sabkha, at cement content of 5% and 10%, which satisfied static requirements and compare it with untreated sabkha in literature. The tests were carried out using the cyclic triaxial test at several effective stresses and cyclic stress ratios (CSR). The averages of shear modulus of cemented sabkha of 5% cement are 38, 32, and 21 MPa for cyclic stress ratio of 0.15, 0.35, and 0.65, respectively; they are 85, 45, and 43 MPa for 10% cement. Furthermore, the averages of damping of 5% cement are 0.03, 0.016, and 0.014 for CSR of 0.15, 0.35, and 0.65, respectively; they are 0.027, 0.012, and 0.01 for 10% cement. The results indicate that the increasing cement content to sabkha from 5 to 10% decreases the shear strain ratio by 0.05, 0.04, and 0.22 for CSR of 0.15, 0.35, and 0.65, respectively. For CSR of 0.15, the change in cement content from 5 to 10% leads to increased shear modulus by 1.4 to 3 times of shear modulus of untreated sabkha; the shear modulus ratio of cemented sabkha to shear modulus to sabkha increases with the increasing number of cycles. The cement content of 5 and 10% leads to a decrease in the normalized damping ratio of cemented sabkha to damping ratio of sabkha with a range from 0.55 to 0.85.