Soil-water retention capacity of expansive soil improved through enzyme induced carbonate precipitation-eggshell powder

Abstract

Enzyme Induced Carbonate Precipitation (EICP) has been extensively investigated as a promising approach to improve engineering properties of soil, while Eggshell Powder (ESP) is an agricultural waste that effectively fills soil pores. The ESP provides abundant nucleation at sites for the EICP process, further promoting the effective precipitation of calcium carbonate. The research presented in this paper investigated the Soil Water Characteristic Curves (SWCC), permeability coefficient, and microstructure of expansive soil before and after EICP and EICP+ESP modification. A series of laboratory experiments were conducted, including soil water characteristic tests, permeability tests and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The results proved that the addition of EICP and EICP+ESP into natural expansive soil resulted in a gradual decline in air entry value, residual water content, and permeability coefficient, indicating an increase in water retention capacity and a decrease in permeability. Furthermore, with the intrusion of EICP and EICP+ESP, the contact between particles becomes smoother, and the soil pores become more equally distributed. Ultimately, there was an enhancement in water retention capacity of the natural expansive soil. This study emphasizes the synergistic potential of combining EICP and EICP+ESP as stabilizing additives to enhance the water retention capacity of expansive soil. Moreover, the reuse of ESP provides a sustainable solution for the resource utilization of agricultural waste and the improvement of expansive soil using bio-inspired methods.

Keywords

Enzyme Induced Carbonate Precipitation (EICP) / Eggshell Powder (ESP) / Expansive soil / Soil-water characteristic curves

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yunlong Liu: Visualization, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Mudassir Mehmood: Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Conceptualization. Yanyan Xia: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Zhencai Luo: Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Yingao Zhao: Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation. Wen Nie: Visualization, Validation, Supervision. Lei Wang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Investigation.

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.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Nation Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Project (No. 42107196).

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