Soil mechanics problems deal with various types of soil that exhibit erratic behaviour in the real world, one such soil being the expansive soil where it takes a lot of laboratory test procedures to ascertain the physical properties of this soil. Modeling the behaviour of the expansive soil is complex and sometimes beyond the aptitude of most traditional procedures of physically-based engineering approaches. Artificial neural networks (ANN) are the ones used for predicting the complex nature of the soil since it has shown superior predictive potential as compared to the conventional approaches. This review aims to deliver and discuss the numerous applications of artificial neural network technique accomplished by various researchers in the field of geotechnical engineering to predict several properties of the expansive soil such as free swell index, unconfined compressive strength, shear strength of the soil, swelling pressure and swell percent, compaction characteristics, and plasticity index. This paper will assist practising engineers in determining the best modelling approaches and formulating the necessary data for using the ANN technique to solve soil mechanics problems.

Expansive soils are the soils that expand when comes in contact with water and shrinks when the water within them gets evaporates. These soil are treated as problematic soils for various construction activities hence there is an essential to improve its strength against load effects and also to alter their behaviour against moisture conditions. This review aimed to study the behaviour of expansive soil stabilized using various natural and industrial processed materials such as cement, polymer, lime, rice husk ash, stone dust, fly ash, coir fiber and its pith, jute, bagasse ash and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS). The paper covers the discussion on experimental test results of black cotton soil conducted by various researchers. The tests being basic geotechnical properties, maximum dry density and optimum moisture content, unconfined compressive strength test (UCS), California bearing ratio (CBR), etc., are presented.