Evaluating the effect of soil grading on the UCS of MICP-treated sandy soils

Abstract

Many past studies have investigated the Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) behaviour of MICP-treated sandy soils and developed empirical relationships to predict strength improvement. While the UCS of MICP-treated soils can be affected by many factors such as chemical concentration, temperature, and biochemistry, it has been found that particle size ($d_{10}$) is one of the important contributing factors, but most of the previously published studies have not considered it. This study applied MICP on three different variants of Adelaide Industrial (AI) clean sands with different grain size distributions to evaluate the effect on UCS and Calcium Carbonate ($CaCO_{3}$) precipitation. To better understand the influence of particle size, this study also collected literature data on UCS, $CaCO_{3}$ content and soil grading properties. A numerical method was used to interpolate the distribution of the combined data (literature and experimental) in 3D space to establish a clear correlation between UCS, $CaCO_{3}$ content (CC) and the soil grading properties. So, contour plots were generated between UCS, CC, and $d_{10}$ and other soil grading properties. Where the 2D and 3D plots could not clearly present the influence of $d_{10}$ on the variation of UCS and CC, contour plots presented the distribution rather clearly. The contour plots showed a visible trend in the variation of UCS and CC for $d_{10}$ and Coefficient of Curvature ($C_{c}$), but not for Coefficient of Uniformity ($C_{ u }$).

Keywords

Unconfined compressive strength / Soil grading / MICP process / Numerical method

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Simon Beecham: Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Md Rajibul Karim: Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Md Mizanur Rahman: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis. Reena Hora: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation.

Declaration of Competing Interest

Reena N.Hora is employed by Tetra Tech Coffey Pty Ltd. The other 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.

Acknowledgement

The first author, Reena N. Hora, would like to acknowledge the Australian Department of Education’s Research Training Program (RTP) at the University of South Australia for providing an opportunity to conduct this research.

Abbreviations

$A_{C}$ - Average $\mathrm{CaCO}_{3}$ Content

AI - Adelaide Industrial

$\mathrm{CaCO}_{3}$ - Calcium Carbonate

$\mathrm{CC}$-$\mathrm{CaCO}_{3}$ Content

$C$ - Molarity of the cementation solution,

$C_{\mathrm{c}}$ - Coefficient of Curvature

$C_{\mathrm{u}}$ - Coefficient of Uniformity

$C_{\text {iv }}$ - Calcite volumetric content

$d_{10}$ - Particle size at 10 \% fines

MICP - Microbial Induced Calcite Precipitation

UCS - Unconfined Compressive Strength

$V$ - Total volume of the specimen

$V_{\mathrm{c}}$ - Volume of Cementation solution injected

$V_{\mathrm{s}}$ - Shear wave velocity

$\eta$ - Porosity

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