A Novel Application of the Hydrophobic Polyurethane Foam: Expansive Soil Stabilization

The reversible shrink-swell behavior of expansive soil imposes a serious challenge that threatens the overlying structures' safety and durability. Traditional chemical additives such as lime and cement still exhibit satisfying performance over their counterparts in terms of swelling potential reduction. Nevertheless, significant concerns are associated with these chemicals, in addition to their environmental impact. This paper proposes a novel application of the closed-cell one-component hydrophobic polyurethane foam (HPUF) to stabilize the swelling soil. An extensive experimental study was performed to assess the efficiency of HPUF in mitigating both the swelling and shrinkage response of high montmorillonite content expansive soil. Expansive soil was injected/mixed with different weight ratios of the proposed stabilizer, and the optimum mixing design and injection percentage of the foam resin were identified to be ranged from 10% to 15%. The shrink-swell behaviors of both injected and noninjected samples were compared. Results of this comparison confirmed that HPUF could competently reduce both the swelling potential and the shrinkage cracking of the reactive expansive soil, even after several wet-shrink cycles.