An Experimental Study to Compare Two Soil Improvement Techniques Performance

The main purposes of the present study were to compare in situ performances of two ground improvement techniques, which are jet grout and deep soil mixing techniques. In this study, Manisa State Hospital Project location was selected as the test site, because this location has difficult geological and geotechnical conditions. In the test site, three jet grout colons and three deep soil mix colons having same cement content were constructed. After 28 days of curing time, the core specimens were extracted for the uniaxial compressive testing, and lump specimens were collected for further tests and analyses such as X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy and determination of physical properties. The results of the uniaxial compression tests show that the uniaxial compressive strengths of the specimens extracted from the deep soil mix colons are drastically higher than those of the jet grout colons. Additionally, to understand the causes of this difference, several features of the improved soil were investigated by various mineralogical and petrographic methods. According to the results of these investigations, the fabric and some mineralogical properties were seriously affected by the improvement technique.