Effect of Freeze-Thaw Cycles on Strength Behavior of Compacted Chicken Quill-Clay Composite in Undrained Loading

A large number of studies have been conducted recently to investigate the influence of randomly oriented fibers on some engineering properties of cohesive and cohesionless soils. However, few studies have been carried out on fine-grained soils reinforced with natural fibers. In this study, a series of triaxial testing (unconsolidated-undrained) and freeze-thaw tests were conducted in laboratory environment in order to investigate the effects of chicken quills dispersed randomly in high plasticity clay on freeze-thaw behavior. Chicken quill percentage was chosen as 0.5%, 1%, and 1.5% of the total dry weight of the reinforced soil. The numbers of freeze-thaw cycles were taken as 5 and 10. As a result of the experiments, it was determined that, the dzeviatoric stress of unreinforced samples caused a decrease when the freeze-thaw cycles increased. However, the deviatoric stress remarkably increases with increasing fiber ratio in different confining pressures, for 5 and 10 freeze-thaw cycles.