Prof. D. N. Singh

PUNEET RATHII

M.Tech.
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, India rathipuneet9@gmail.com

INVESTIGATIONS ON THERMALLY INDUCED VOLUMETRIC CHANGE OF MARINE CLAYS

Thermally?Induced?Volumetric?Change, TIVC, of soils is of prime importance for safe design, execution and performance of various thermo-active geo-infrastructures. This phenomenon is mainly governed by the response of the constituents of the soil matrix (i.e., pore-fluid and soil grains) to the elevated temperatures (read thermal loading), which cause differential thermal expansion of these constituents. However, apart from the presence of pore-fluid and soil grains, soils such as marine clays might also contain a substantial amount of the organic matter, OM, which is susceptible to decompose at elevated temperatures. Hence, the influence of the OM on the TIVC of marine clays should be investigated in detail. With this in view, an attempt has been made in the present study to quantify the influence of the OM present in marine clay, sampled from the coastal region of Mumbai, India, on their volumetric strains, which are induced due to elevated temperatures. To achieve this objective, re-constituted samples of the marine clays were subjected to a thermal cycle under constant mechanical load in a specially designed and fabricated thermal consolidation test setup, designated as ?ThermConS?. Slurries of the marine clays, in their virgin (designated as VMC) and oven-dried (designated as ODMC) states were employed in this study and the results were analysed. This preliminary exercise reveals that OM plays an important role in TIVC of marine clays, which in turn would influence their overall thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) characteristics.