The coastal Orissa, India with frequent flood and cyclone causes water logging in most part of the year, so flexible pavements are being found not to be suitable. The coastal areas being thickly populated and due to above calamities people are forced to have their houses close to the embankments and hence required rigid concrete pavements. In India, till date only 35-40% fly ashes are being used and unused fly ash covers vast track of valuable land as ash pond. There is a need to use fly ash in large quantities and high volume fly ash (HVFA) concrete may be the need of the time. In this report, the rigid concrete pavement is designed as per IRC: SP:62-2004 (Guidelines for the Design and Construction of Cement Concrete Pavement for Rural Roads) using HVFA concrete and a cost comparison is made with respect to that of concrete with 0% fly ash. Design mix for M30 grade concrete with different percentage of fly ash replacement are studied in laboratory to find out the effect of fly ash content on fresh concrete and hardened concrete. The effect of curing and durability is also studied and discussed.

The rapid advance in information processing systems in recent decades directed engineering research towards the development of various soft computing techniques that can model natural phenomena automatically. The new soft computing techniques (SVM, LSSVM, RVM, MARS) is being applied successfully to solve different engineering problems. But, the application of these new soft computing techniques in geotechnical engineering is very little. The proposed book will give an idea of these new soft computing techniques to geotechnical community. The application of these new soft computing techniques in geotechnical engineering will also be described. The book is aimed at researchers and practitioners who are engaged in developing and applying soft computing tools to solving geotechnical engineering problems. It is also suitable as wider reading for geotechnical engineering postgraduate students.