Evaluation of Soil Stabilizer in Oil Palm Plantation Road Construction

Plantation road construction is an important part that requires a serious planning. Any negligence in constructing and maintaining the roads will affect the infield transportation time of the harvested agricultural products as well as the process of bringing out the agricultural products to the needs. Moreover, weather conditions will make the roads impassable and create poor road surfaces which cause damage to the vehicles. Hence, without regular maintenance and resurfacing, these roads will have limited useful lives. This paper has done the laboratory work to evaluate the unconfined compressive strength of oil palm soil by using the FJ-Adtech additive stabilisers as an enhancing medium. Lahad Datu plantation soils were mixed well with additive loadings of 14 wt. % up to 20 wt. % and being pressed at 100 kPa in compacted form sample with the size of 100 mm (height) x 50 mm (diameter). The results showed that the FJ-Ad treatment effectively improved the strength characteristics of Lahad Datu soil (4311 kPa) at 20 wt. % of loading percentage compared to the untreatment soil (1382 kPa). Field work observation also showed that the road construction surfaces treated with the stabiliser formulation showed less maintenance as 6% to 7 % cheaper compared to the conventional method. Therefore, this additive stabiliser is suitable to be used as soil treatment in the formulation for making the road surfaces more durable, less permeable and less compressed than the native soil.