Increasing emphasis on energy conservation and environmental protection has led to the investigation of the alternatives to customary building materials. Some of the significant goals behind understaking such investigations are to reduce the greenhouse gasemissions and minimize the energy required formaterial production.The usage of concrete around the world is second only to water. Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) is conventionally used as the primary binder to produce concrete. The cement production is a significant industrial activity in terms of its volume and contribution to greenhouse gas emission. Globally, the production of cement contributes at least 5 to 7 % of CO 2. Another major problem of the environment is to dispose off the fly ash, a hazardous waste material, which is produced by thermal power plant by combustion of coal in power generation processes. The geopolymer concrete aims at utilizing the maximum amount of fly ash and reduce CO 2 emission in atmosphere by avoiding use of cement to making concrete. This paper reports an experimental work conducted to investigate the effect of curing conditions on the compressive strength of geopolymer concrete prepared by using fly ash as base material and combination of sodium hydroxide and sodium silicate as alkaline activator.

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The problem of laterally loaded piles is particularly a complex soil-structure interaction problem. The flexural stresses developed due to the combined action of axial load and bending moment must be evaluated in a realistic and rational manner for safe and economical design of pile foundation. The paper reports the finite element analysis of pile groups. For this purpose simplified models along the lines similar to that suggested by Desai et al. (1981) are used for idealizing various elements of the foundation system. The pile is idealized one dimensional beam element, pile cap as two dimensional plate element and the soil as independent closely spaced linearly elastic springs. The analysis takes into consideration the effect of interaction between pile cap and soil underlying it. The pile group is considered to have been embedded in cohesive soil. The parametric study is carried out to examine the effect of pile spacing, pile diameter, number of piles and arrangement of pile on the responses of pile group. The responses considered include the displacement at top of pile group and bending moment in piles. The results obtained using the simplified approach of the F.E. analysis are further compared with the results of the complete 3-D F.E. analysis published earlier and fair agreement is observed in the either result.

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Fly ash is a pozzolanic waste from the burning of coal ash in thermal power plant which will be unchangeable in India and increasing environmental pollution. There is an urgent need of increasing bulk utilization of fly ash in geotechnical application. In this regard, a study was undertaken to investigate the bearing capacity of fly ash slopes (β) with the strip footing of width (B) 0.1 m located at different edge distances (D e = 1B, 2B, 3B) from slope crest. These tests were conducted in the laboratory and the pressure-settlement behaviour of strip footing on unreinforced and reinforced fly ash slope having an angle of 45˚ was studied. The embedment ratio (Z/B = 0.30), and the depth of first layer of polyester geogrid reinforcement were investigated with different footing edge distances (D e = 1B, 2B, 3B). From the experiment, pressure and settlements were measured and subsequently, the pressure settlement curves were drawn. It is observed from test results that the load carrying capacity is found to increase with an edge distance in both cases: unreinforced and reinforced slope. Also, a substantial increase is observed in the bearing capacity with the addition of geogrid reinforcement. It is observed that, the bearing capacity ratio (BCR) decreases with edge distance increase. These investigations demonstrate that both, the ultimate bearing capacity and settlement characteristics of the foundation, can be improved due to the inclusion of reinforcements within the fill.

The experimental investigation for the characterization of strength of fiber reinforced cement-fly ash mixes is presented in this paper. The objective of the investigation was to quantify the optimum quantity of cement contents and randomly distributed polypropylene fibers on the performance of cement stabilized and fiber reinforced fly ash mixes. Four samples of the mixes were considered in this investigation. For each sample, the fly ash was replaced by 5, 10, 15 and 20 % cement content, respectively. Similarly, the contents of the fibers were also varied by 0, 0.5, 1, and 1.5 %, respectively. The aspect of soaking was also considered. The samples were cured for 7, 14 and 28 days respectively. For the purpose of evaluation, unconfined compressive strength test and Brazilian (i.e., indirect) tensile strength test were conducted. The results obtained indicate significant improvement in strength with the inclusion of fibers and cement. The investigation underscores the effective utilization of pozzolanic waste such as fly ash as a civil engineering material.

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