A Solid Foundation with PLCs

It’s no wonder there is so much need for new residential construction in Florida: in May 2021, data indicated that 330,000 people had moved to the state since a year earlier, or about 900 to 1000 people each day. And that trend is expected to continue through 2025.  

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South of Tampa, Sarasota National Communities is one of the many residential developments helping to meet the growing demand for housing in Florida. Yet, as most builders know, where soil conditions may not provide a good foundation, soil stabilization is a common improvement technique to help prepare ground for construction. In this approach, builders mix a small percentage of cement into soil with an appropriate water content, then use compaction equipment to densify the material in place. At Sarasota National, soil stabilization was done for the road bases.

Developers of Sarasota National were not familiar with portland-limestone cement for soil stabilization and had concerns about changing to a different cement for this application. The cement supplier, along with the sales and technical engineering team, supplied performance data to demonstrate the properties of the PLC-modified soil, which incorporated 4% cement dosage by weight of soil. This convinced the developer that PLC mixes would achieve the performance aspects they needed and offered sustainable benefits, too. For the 1000 tons (907 metric tons) of cement used on this project, switching from traditional portland cement to PLC resulted in an estimated CO2 savings of 76 tons (69 metric tons) and the customer continues to use PLC for their other stabilization projects. 

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This case study was provided by Argos USA. For more information, feel free to send any inquiries to our project contact.