Impact of lime treated soils performance on design of earthfill dikes

It has been shown during the last decade that appropriate treatment technologies provide lime treated soils with high level properties of great interest for hydraulic works. Those properties can lead to innovative earthfill dams and dikes designs by addressing some of the typical designer's problems such as stability, watertightness, internal erosion, surface protection and flood control. However, lime treated soil external erosion resistance is still to be quantified in the field for proper designing and dimensioning of external erosion protection or spillways. With this purpose, an experimental earthfill dike has been built in France in July 2015. This paper describes the performance of lime treated soils, known as of today, or to be quantified in the very near future, and associated design requirements, the dike construction, the monitoring program and the perspectives opened by lime treatment.