Influence of waste tire rubber fibers on swelling behavior, unconfined compressive strength and ductility of cement stabilized bentonite clay soil

•The Dry density decrease when tire rubber fiber content and cement increase.•The Liquid limits decreases when tire rubber fiber and cement are increasing.•The swell potentials and swelling pressure decrease with increasing fiber ratio.•The UCS of stabilized clayey soil increases with increasing tire rubber fiber.•The Ductility (D) significantly increases with increasing fiber ratio. The main objective of this work is to study the influence of waste tire rubber fibers on unconfined compressive strength, swelling behavior, swell-consolidation, loading-unloading tests and ductility of stabilized bentonite clay soil by cement. In this context, we conducted a series of experiments that were carried out on reinforced samples with tire rubber fiber contents of 0, 0.5, 1 and 2% cement-stabilized samples with cement contents of 5, 7.5 and 10% were conducted. The results show that the liquid limits, dry density, swell potentials and swelling pressure decrease gradually when tire rubber fiber content and cement increase. This reduction is important for the clay soil with the higher swelling potential. Due to the waste tire rubber high compressibility, the compression and the recompression indexes considerably increase with the waste tire rubber fiber and cement content. The stress-strain curves from the UCS tests showed that the inclusion of tire fibers within cemented soil increased the UCS. Maximum UCS and ductility behavior was attained at a rubber fiber content of 2%. The obtained results allowed highlighting the beneficial effect of the fiber, the fibers-reinforced cement specimens were found to be much more ductile than unreinforced specimens, which is highly desirable in many backfill applications.