Soil cement for low cost roads

In ensuring rapid development to take place, provision of good roads is inevitable. The high cost of the conventional roads has not been very contributive. Many areas are still being served with graded latrite roads or none at all. Laterite road is notorious for being dusty during the dry seasons, causing accumulation of undesirable blanket of dust on to houses and vegetations. The dust may also have a serious effect on health. Forma­tion of deep ruts which are unpassable to vehicles at times is a common occurance in the wet seasons. Thus a high cost is incurred if the roads are to be maintained. The paper intends to present the works car­ried out at the University Pertanian Malaysia on the stabilization of lateritic soils using cement to act both as the road base and surfacing. The works include conducting basic soil mechanics tests on the soil-cement mix­ture and evaluating the effect of additives such as sand and rice husk ash on strength. A field trial on the construction of the soil­cement road was also done to evaluate the weathering effect under exposure.