Applied Research Journal
Volume:4 Issue: 2, Feb 2018

Compression of soil is manifested in settlement of foundations. Differential or discrepancy settlement, which may be disastrous, leading to cracking and collapse of the structural members. Settlement magnitude and rate in addition to differential settlement are the most important issues in stability analysis if structures. The recent paper is investigated the settlement behavior of the sand soil in Al-Najaf city, Iraq. The samples are from two neighbor locations in the site of University of Kufa and each sample are remolded to the specific density and moisture content. To predict the settlement, two sets of single Oedometer tests on the selected soil samples are made with three stress levels, 50, 100 and 200 kPa. The settlement is quick and be achieved within few minutes. The results illustrate that there is initially different behavior of the settlement from the two sets of tests. While for the higher density about 60% of the final settlement is reached immediately for different stress levels whereas the sample of lower density sample reached 80% of final settlement at first two stress level the 70% under the third stress level. This diverge in the settlement results decreases with increase the stress and the settlement is in same trend and magnitude for both test sets. The final settlement ratio is about 5%. The compression index (Cc) is 0.0533 and the expansion index (Cr) is 0.003.

Sodium silicate is a high viscous liquid which is used as raw materials for producing silica gel, component of soaps and detergents, inks, cement etc. Conventionally sodium silicate is produced by fusing sand and soda ash together at high temperature in tank furnace and subsequently digesting the fused mass in water. In the pilot plant study, an alternative process has been developed for the production of sodium silicate. In this process sodium silicate was produced by reacting rice husk ash, sodium hydroxide and water. The prepared samples were characterized and compared with the sample collected from local market.