The use of soil mixing for providing stabilization of soft or loose soils is considered a fairly new technology in the United States. Soil mixing has been successfully applied for liquifaction mitigation, steel reinforced retaining walls, groundwater cutoff walls, and stabilization of contaminated soils. Applications of this technology have recently been further expanded. Such applications have included settlement control of soils, slope stabilization and the formation of composite gravity structures. To design for these applications, the unconfined compressive strength, elastic modulus and shear strength of the soil and soil-cement columns must be determined or estimated. Settlement control of soft or loose soils under service loads can be sufficiently controlled with treatment ratios in the 20% to 35% range. On a recent project in Honolulu, Hawaii, loose soils were sufficiently stabilized with a 23% treatment ratio, and at a site in Lakeland, Florida, a very soft and compressible clay layer was sufficiently stabilized with only a 12% treatment ratio. In slope stability applications, soil mixing improves the overall shear strength of the soil formation to adequately increase the factor of safety, and also the soil-cement columns can force the potential failure surface deeper. Lastly, soil mixing has been applied to construct in-situ gravity structures where its composite action design assumption was confirmed with an instrumented test wall, and used in two recent commercial applications.
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