Bio-grouting technologies for enhancing uniformity of biocementation: A review

Abstract

Biocementation-based soil improvement is an emerging ground treatment method in geotechnical engineering that has garnered extensive attention over the past two decades. One of the challenges associated with this method revolves around the uniformity of biocementation, a crucial factor closely tied to bio-grouting technology. The traditional biotreatment methods, the two-phase method and the one-phase method, suffer from the issue of non-uniform biocementation. Consequently, in recent years, various improved grouting technologies have been proposed to address this concern by aiding bacterial adsorption and controlling carbonate precipitation. This paper reviews the mechanisms and grouting processes employed in these enhanced bio-grouting technologies. Additionally, the challenges of implementing these grouting technologies in real-world applications are also thoroughly discussed.

Keywords

Biocementation / Soil improvement / Grouting technology / Uniformity

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Junjie Zheng and Jianwei Zhang are editorial board members, Mingjuan Cui is an early career editorial board member for Biogeotechnics and were not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the financial support by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant Nos. 52178319, 52108307, 52078236, 51878313, 51708243), and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province, China (Grant Nos. 2022J05020, 2022J05127).

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