Geo Engineering Properties of Pond Ash-bentonitemixes

Abstract

The development of any country depends on increasing the industries and agriculture, which is governed by adequate power supply. In India major source of power generation is by coal based thermal power plants. Present day’s coal based thermal power industries are increasing day by day. Coal available in India is low grade coal with ash content of 30-45% in comparison to imported coal which has low ash content of 10-15%. In India, total 145 coal based thermal power plants are existed by the year of 2014-2015. Thermal power plants are major sources of ash generation. Typically these plants are produces two types of ash materials: Fly ash and Bottom ash. These two types of ash are mixed thoroughly with large quantities of water and sluiced to onsite storage ponds called ash ponds. Massive utilization of pond ash in engineering field requires thorough understanding of its geotechnical properties, especially strength characteristics.
In the present study, a detailed experimental investigation was carried out on the strength and other geotechnical properties of pond ash samples mixed with different bentonite content. The main focus of the study was to evaluate the engineering properties of pond ash-bentonite mixes and assessing its suitability in various geotechnical constructions mainly the land fill liner.
The Pond ash and bentonite samples are characterized and analyzed for the various geotechnical properties. The various experimental works were carried out to determine the index and engineering properties of pond ash with and without bentonite content. Index properties such as density index, plastic limit, liquid limit and engineering properties such as compaction and consolidation characteristics, shear strength were found by conducting various experiments accordingly.
All the experiments were conducted by adding bentonite ranging from 5 to 30% at 5% interval to the pond ash and results were compiled in the graphical form to observe the trends in various parameters.