Microbially induced carbonate precipitation for soil improvement: Insights from a meter-scale radial grouting trial

Abstract

Despite the growing interest in microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) for geotechnical applications, reports on meter-scale MICP trials for soil improvement remain limited, and controlling and predicting cementation efficiency on a large-scale is even more scarce. This study presented a meter-scale improvement of a poorly-graded sand (initial dry density: 1581 kg/m³, porosity: 40 %) through MICP in a cylindrical cell (diameter: 1 m; thickness: 15 cm) using a radial flow injection strategy, which involves injecting fluids radially from a single well located at the center while maintaining a constant hydraulic head at the outer boundary. Nine cycles of a two-phase MICP treatment were applied: Phase 1- injection of 0.7 pore volumes (PVs) of bacterial solution and 1-L water pulse; Phase 2- injection of 1.4 PVs of 0.5 mol/L cementing solution in two stages (i) 0.7 PV injection two hours after the bacteria were injected, and (ii) a further 0.7 PV injection the following morning after an overnight static reaction period. We observed non-uniform CaCO₃ precipitations along the distance from the central well and over the depth, which was induced by the decreasing flux towards the outer boundary under the radial flow pattern, along with influences from layered soil packing and hydraulically induced flow channels. CaCO₃ precipitation with distance from the central well follows a symmetric Gaussian-type distribution, with sufficient cementation to retrieve full-length cores occurring near the midpoint between the central well and the outer boundary. The unconfined compressive strengths of the full-length cores were in the range of 1.2-6.8 MPa with CaCO₃ contents of 0.08-0.17. Our study suggests that cementation level under radial flow conditions is controllable on a large scale and highly dependent on the injection volume of both bacteria and rinsing water pulse. The study provides a solid baseline for predicting and controlling CaCO₃ distribution in large-scale MICP soil improvement using a two-phase radial injection approach.

Keywords

MICP / Biocementation / Radial flow / Large-scale / Two-phase grouting / CaCO₃ distribution

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Guijie Sang: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Rebecca J. Lunn: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Investigation, Funding acquisition. James M. Minto: Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Grainne El Mountassir: Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization.

Data Availability

All data underpinning this publication are openly available from the University of Liverpool’s Research Data Catalogue at 10.17638/datacat.liverpool.ac.uk/2863.

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.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the BAM Nuttall/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Biomineral Technologies for Ground Engineering. The contribution of El Mountassir was supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (MR/V025376/1). We thank Jason Eriksen from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering for collecting the SEM images.

Appendix A. Supporting information

Supplementary data associated with this article can be found in the online version at doi:10.1016/j.bgtech.2024.100157.

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