Design of a strength model for foamed lightweight soil

Abstract

Foamed lightweight soil has been widely used in civil engineering, and the model for foam concrete has been employed to predict its strength. However, various previous strength models of foam concrete are generally based on the assumption of complete hydration, which is not the case for foamed lightweight soil. For example, Nambiar’s model (reference), a simple and widely used model, sets the ratio of hydrated water to cement by weight as an empirical constant, which is actually related to the water-cement ratio before the completion of hydration for foamed lightweight soil. To address this issue, an improved strength model tailor-made for foamed lightweight soil was proposed to establish a relationship between the ratio of hydrated water to cement and the water-cement ratio. The improved model and the original Nambiar’s model were compared with actual strength data, which shows that this improved model is more effective for foamed lightweight soil.