Expansive soils, with high swell and shrink behavior prove to be challenging for construction and pavement activities. Expansive soils will heave and cause lifting of building or other structures during high moisture variations and they attain shrinkage and it will be result in building settlement during dry spells [1]. They also exert pressure on the vertical face of the foundations, basements and retaining walls resulting in lateral movements [2]. Apart from its effects on building constructions and foundations, they will surely gain impact on roads, ground anchors, underground pipelines and other ground structures.
Expansive soils cover almost 20% of India’s land cover and about 8% of the world’s land cover. Hence, they cannot be simply ignored of construction and pavement activities because of their problematic nature [3]. There are several methods available for improving the characteristics of expansive soils, but an efficient and cost effective method with less time is always preferable.
Most researches on improvement of expansive soils have come out with numerous fruitful solutions including chemical stabilization techniques and deep foundation techniques. The most significant among them being the lime stabilization. The basic concept behind chemical stabilization for expansive soil is that, expansion occurs because of absorption water molecules in the diffuse double layer through three possible mechanisms, the stabilization works on the concept of introducing cation of high valence than that of water, which gets attracted to the clay minerals and brings clay minerals closer together[4].
In this study, an attempt is made to study the saline water which is opted from the mixing of salts and distilled water at various concentrations as an effective chemical stabilizer in expansive soils.